DAVIE, Fla. — Patrick Cobbs can still see the play in his mind.

It came off one of many Wildcat snaps the Dolphins used in their first win over the Jets last season. On this one play, however, a hard tackle by Jets linebacker Bryan Thomas cost the Dolphins dearly.

Trailing 24-20 midway through the fourth quarter, they lost Cobbs, one of their most versatile contributors, for the rest of the season.

“It was an end around,” Cobbs says of that handoff from Ronnie Brown. “I got the ball. The play was kind of dead. I tried to plant to stay in bounds. (Thomas) kind of grabbed me by my back and twisted me around. I just felt my knee pop. It was kind of a bad deal.”

Kind of? Cobbs soon underwent major reconstructive surgery on his knee and spent the rest of the year on injured reserve after that Oct. 12 setback.

The slippery little scatback returned to a limited role during organized team activities this offseason. Before he could begin traveling the long road back, however, he had to get his mind right.

“I knew right when it happened that something wasn’t right,” Cobbs says. “It kind of crushed me. I was hurt more emotionally than I was with my knee right at the time.”

He had never been injured seriously. Not in high school growing up in Oklahoma. Not in college at North Texas. And not since coming to the NFL as an undrafted free agent in 2006, first with a brief stop in Pittsburgh and ever since with the Dolphins.

He credits the Dolphins training staff with helping him regain strength in the knee and learn to trust that it won’t break down again.

“I got a lot of my confidence back in the weight room, putting pressure on it,” he says. “It’s kind of slow to build. I haven’t got it all back, but I’m making it.”

It helped greatly having Dolphins cornerback Will Allen — his next-door neighbor in the locker room — to confide in and compare notes with after Allen suffered a similar knee injury two weeks later against the Saints.

“We’ve been kind of on the same timeline,” Cobbs says. “It’s been huge for us getting to push each other and motivate each other. I’ve had somebody to kind of lean on, and he’s had somebody to kind of lean on throughout this whole process.”

Dolphins coach Tony Sparano certainly had come to lean on Cobbs after giving him the opportunity to enjoy a breakout season in 2008. Cobbs distinguished himself in so many areas: third-down receiving threat, kickoff returner, Wildcat weapon, special teams torpedo.

Losing Cobbs had a tremendous ripple effect.

“We missed this guy a lot,” Sparano says. “There’s a lot of jobs he does that not a lot of people want to stand in line for, and this guy does them and he does them well. Until he’s not there you don’t really realize just how well he does it.”

Cobbs, the shortest Dolphin at 5 feet 8, hopes to reclaim as many of his former jobs as possible but realizes that may take some time.

“It’s moving along, but I’m not all the way there yet,” he says. “I want to be able to do everything I did before and I want to do those jobs better. I want to be able to do even a lot more. I’m not taking this injury as an excuse of why I can’t do something.”

So is he on schedule?

“I’m on my schedule,” he says with a smile. “Whether that be ahead of a lot of people’s schedules, right now I’m comfortable with the progress I’m making.”

All Cobbs knows for certain is how much he looks forward to his first preseason game.

“Oh, man, it’s going to be great,” he says. “I can’t help but smile anytime somebody says something about that. I can’t wait to get back on the white lines and the green grass and in front of all the people. I’m anxious to run around and do the things I’ve been doing for a long time in my life.”

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