ROJM is quite the troll, no?
Here's the fact: Worldwide
the SNES outsold the Genesis 49.1 million to 40 million. Sega may have won on some regions but lost so badly in others the SNES came out the victor.
Sega's never won a console war but were close with the Genesis. They've won several major battles but ultimately lost the war.
In American football, there's a phenomenon known as "garbage time." If one team has decisively beaten the other, but there's still a fair amount of time left in the game, the winning team usually rests most of their starters and lets the back-ups play against the losing team in the remaining "garbage time." The losing team is then able to score some points, and often racks up some statistics that look impressive on paper if you hadn't actually watched the game and seen how thoroughly they were beaten.
That's basically what happened with the SNES. It didn't surpass the sales of the Gen/MD until it didn't matter anymore, when the entire industry was moving on into the next generation. When 16-bit was relevant, Sega beat Nintendo decisively.
And the huge flaw with your analogy is that
the losing team made a comeback and won the game. Sega has nothing but to blame itself for losing in such a way, and the idea that "it didn't matter anymore" is a ridiculous excuse. A coach would get sacked for saying something like this: "We lost the game due to fielding our reserve team, but we were ahead by a comfortable amount of points so it didn't really matter that the opposing team were scoring and made the comeback against us. Since that didn't matter, we actually won."
Realize how ridiculous that sounds? The cold fact is that in the end, Sega lost, and has never won a console war while it was a first-party company. Only Nintendo and Sony (and perhaps Atari) can claim victory for at least one console war.