I'd be willing to give you that when it comes to the earlier mistake, but the fumble was THE GAME. It's no different than the "just give it to 'em" game where the receiver was both short of the 1st down and out of bounds, and the game would have been over right then and there.
Look, bad officiating is bad officiating. Don't try to excuse it just because the team that got screwed had another chance to win it, when they should have won it earlier. How Hochuli could have ruled that it was an incomplete forward pass when the ball went backwards is a complete mystery and against the laws of physics.