One pass.

Forget about the record eight-point margin by which Kurt Busch beat Jimmie Johnson to win the 2004 Chase for the Nextel Cup. It was even more basic at the end of Sunday’s Ford 400 at Homestead-Miami Speedway.

On a green-white-checkered finish, Tony Stewart’s race-leading car sputtered with a fuel-intake issue as he hit the gas and Greg Biffle, running behind Stewart, saw what was happening.

“I got off the gas, on the brakes and jerked the wheel to the right,” Biffle said.

The maneuver allowed Biffle to avoid wrecking his Ford, Stewart’s Chevrolet and who knows how many others. It also gave Biffle the lead in a race in which his No. 16 Ford was clearly the strongest car.

Jeff Gordon and Johnson, desperately racing to catch Kurt Busch in the title Chase, also passed Stewart, whose engine finally came to life in time for him to pull off in fourth place just ahead of Busch.

Behind Busch, Brendan Gaughan, Jamie McMurray and Rusty Wallace still had nearly two laps left to try to pass the 26-year-old driver trying to hold on for the championship.

On the final lap, Johnson got past Gordon for second. But Biffle was long gone, on his way to his second win of the season.

What if Biffle had suffered the same fate Ryan Newman had on Lap 265, when he cut a tire while leading, wrecked and wound up finishing 30th?

First, Johnson would have won the race. In doing so, he would have earned 185 points in the final race instead of 170 — 180 for winning and five bonus points for leading a lap, something he had not done.

That would have given Johnson 6,513 points for the year.

Busch, meanwhile, would have successfully held off Gaughan and the others for fourth instead of fifth.

Busch also led a lap, the race’s first four laps after earning the pole on Friday, so a fourth-place finish would have given him 165 points in the finale and 6,511 points for the year — two fewer than Johnson. It would have cost him about $3 million, the difference between first- and second-place money from the Nextel Cup points fund.

But that one pass never happened and, like the what-if game people have tried to play all year with the former points system, those “would-have-been” numbers don’t matter.

Johnson will have to wait another year, at least, to win his first championship.

Busch, on the other hand, got to hoist the trophy and celebrate the ultimate NASCAR moment with car owner Jack Roush, crew chief Jimmy Fennig and the rest of a team that passed every test the Chase threw at them since Sept. 19.

As he went down the backstretch, somebody finally got through on his radio to confirm that he was, indeed, the champion.

“We did it, boys!” he yelled. “We did it!”

By one pass.