BOULDER — LaJohntay Wester had only one way to describe the postgame scene after an improbable comeback win over Baylor.

“A party,” said Wester, who was on the other end of Shedeur Sanders’ Hail Mary pass at the end of regulation. “I loved it, man. There ain’t nothing like here. There’s no better feeling than winning here and coming in the locker room when it’s literally a party.”

Colorado had plenty of reason to celebrate after a win like that. It took some heroics rivaled only by games like the “Miracle at Michigan” to knock off Baylor in the Big 12 opener. But Sanders knew what was coming the day after, once the dust settled and the celebrations stopped.

“You know we are definitely getting punished,” the Buffaloes quarterback said with a smile. “We’re getting punished (Sunday) for all the mistakes, I would say, for all of the penalties, for missed throws, reads, everything.”

There’s a reason for that, too.

While a bevy of special teams miscues nearly cost CU the game and a few explosive plays allowed by the Buffs defense overshadowed an overall solid game, what made Sanders mad was his own performance.

His final stat line of 341 passing yards and two touchdowns was par for the course for Sanders in his time in Boulder, but it was far from his sharpest game.

Sanders’ completion percentage finished at 61 — his third-lowest over the last two seasons — but it was hovering in the 50s for much of the game. He was awfully close to having the first game of his CU career with a completion percentage below 60.

The offensive performance as a whole was saved by a handful of big plays.

The first one was a 58-yard touchdown pass to Omarion Miller late in the first half. It was a play in which Miller somehow stayed on his feet while absorbing a hit from a Baylor defender, getting back to full speed and running into the end zone.

There were also two passes to Travis Hunter for a combined 77 yards on a drive in the third quarter that tied the game at 24.

And there was the Hail Mary to Wester.

All told, six explosive passing plays accounted for 219 of Sanders’ 341 yards.

“I know personally I didn’t play anywhere close to my best game at all,” Sanders said. “I know offensively, we didn’t play anywhere close to the best game we could have had at all. We were talking the whole game like something was going to happen. When Omarion got in and made that play, we needed somebody to make a play and do something special. So that was the message during the game because offensively we just weren’t clicking. I was missing reads.

“You gotta understand I can’t have a game like that again.”

Sanders did not blame his offensive line despite being sacked eight times and with pressure in his face on plenty more plays.

There was more reshuffling up front and, through four games, it seems like the offensive line is back at square one with two good performances and two bad performances in the first month of the season.

As the Buffs showed once again, keeping Shedeur upright is the No. 1 key to success.

Even as the hits keep coming, the star quarterback keeps getting up.

“When it comes to Saturdays, I just don’t care. I’ll do whatever it takes to win,” Shedeur said.

The Buffs’ locker room knew the mood would’ve been different if a pair of unlikely plays didn’t go their way late Saturday night. The feeling of a win like that is indescribable, but it’s one they don’t want to get used to.

“We know when it’s crunch time, we know we got what we want to do,” Hunter said. “But at the end of the day, we still didn’t want to win a game like that. We want to go out with a bang. That’s not the way we want to win. We want to go out and play how we should play.”