ALLEN PARK, Mich. -- George Johnson may have been sick of the silence, but on the last Saturday of August, it was all he could hope for.

Too often over the past year, the silence led to heartache and the crushing realization that once again, no one was interested. This time, though, silence meant progress. Silence meant a job. Silence meant one more chance in the NFL.

Then the 4 p.m. deadline for roster cuts passed. The phone call he and his wife, Rebecca, loathed never came.

“Me and my wife actually cried,” Johnson said. “We never thought we would get to this point. We never thought we would see the day again when I would be on an NFL roster again.”

When Johnson showed up as a late free agent signing in Detroit on April 22, he figured to be roster fodder for the Lions as the team waited for Ezekiel Ansah to recover from offseason shoulder surgery. It is why when free agency started a month earlier and his phone didn’t ring, he thought it might all be over.

He had been out of work since Minnesota released him on Oct. 9, 2013. Then, he figured his phone would ring immediately and his agent would tell him his next destination. Yet all that came was silence.

Money ran low. He could train all he wanted, but if no team showed interest, there was nowhere to go. He investigated jobs in construction and perhaps as a nightclub bouncer, his college education at Rutgers of little use at the time.

Johnson never thought he’d be there so soon -- out of the NFL, the world of football moving on without him.

“I thought I was going to get a call during those times but I never got a call so I thought, eh, it’s over,” Johnson said. “It’s not going to happen.”

He called his agent, Brian Levy, and told him he wanted to retire. He had Rebecca and two children, Olivia, 5, and George, 2, to care for. He had seven tackles in four seasons with Tampa Bay and Minnesota. He had some sort of NFL career after being undrafted out of Rutgers.

Levy told Johnson he would get one more shot and he would thrive. Johnson figured it was his agent doing what he was paid for -- picking up his client during a low period. That’s all.

Then the Lions called. The shot Levy said would come did. Johnson joined the Lions after spring workouts started, on a team with young defensive ends in Ansah and Devin Taylor, an established pro in Jason Jones and a higher-priority free agent in Darryl Tapp. Then the Lions drafted a defensive end, Larry Webster, in the fourth round. The room on the roster shrunk more.

Yet the Lions liked Johnson. Detroit’s first-year head coach, Jim Caldwell, praised Johnson’s explosiveness and rush skills. He had a wry smile when he talked about him during training camp.

Still, Johnson didn’t know if his shot was real. Until it was. With Ansah out, the Lions moved Johnson to the first team during spring workouts.

“Completely shocked me,” Johnson said. “Usually teams don’t move people around during OTAs. They just keep it steady. But to move me up during OTAs, it actually showed something, that they really wanted to look at me and trusted me to do something.

“It was shocking but at the same time, I had to be humble and say thanks for the opportunity and keep working as I was.”

Johnson and his wife knew this was his last shot. Had that phone rang the last Saturday in August, thanking him for his work and asking his playbook, he was giving the Lions back more than their defensive scheme.

He was handing in his pro career.

“That was the thought, that I was going to be done,” Johnson said. “There’s a lot of heartache and pain in this game and Rebecca got tired of seeing me so upset and I got tired of putting my family to the back.

“So I thought if I don’t make it, it was a great opportunity, it was a lot of fun, but…”

Johnson’s voiced trailed off. He didn’t need to finish. The phone never rang. Johnson showed that sometimes last shots, long shots, can end up paying off.