In one of Seinfeld’s most memorable episodes, George spends the entire 30 minutes telling his friends about the great comeback he would have employed against an insulting coworker, if he’d thought of it at the time. At the end, he travels halfway across the country and painstakingly recreates the original situation just to tell the guy “The jerk store called, and they’re running out of you!” A sick burn that Ben Carson’s campaign almost landed on Donald Trump last night was kind of like that, too.

After the debate, Carson campaign manager Ben Bennett approached a Weekly Standard reporter in the spin room and told him about the way his candidate would have totally owned the Republican frontrunner, if only he’d had the chance:

“We were kind of hoping he would [attack]. We were all set to really go after him,” Carson campaign manager Barry Bennett told me in the spin room after the debate. According to Bennett, Carson planned on telling Trump: “I saved 15,000 lives in the operating room. And you don’t appreciate my service, but I wouldn’t trade a single one of them for all of your money. Money’s not important to me. It’s not what’s important to most Americans.”

But the opportunity to deliver those lines never came as Trump refrained from criticizing Carson to his face during the two-hour debate. “It’s kind of Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde. When he’s alone at night with his Twitter account, he can say some pretty nasty things. But then when he’s around people it’s all nicey-nice,” Bennett said. “I don’t know. He’s an entertainer.”

Damn! Damn. But when you have flames that hot, you should use them in person. Carson wouldn’t have even had to fly to Ohio like George to do it—he could have just waited until next month.

h/t Simon Maloy. Image via AP. Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.