swissvale72 wrote: ↑Sat Dec 28, 2019 6:37 pm
PennyBacker wrote: ↑Sat Dec 28, 2019 4:20 pm
Full appreciation for how incredible this was will likely not ever be possible for fans who were not yet born at the time when this occurred - like myself.
It still amazes me how this was the
last play of the game. And, how it was the first playoff win in franchise history.
It wasn't actually the last play of the game....there were still 5 seconds left and Oakland threw one last bomb. Jack Ham may have intercepted it.
Both yinz make good points. I know Swiss was at Three Rivers that Saturday, as doubtlessly my brother and Dad would have been as well, except for the fact that we had fled the snow a few years earlier and moved from the Burgh to SoCal .
We
were, however, in the house the week before, as we made the rainy trek down the coast to San Diego to see the Steelers clinch their first-ever sole-division crown by beating up on the hapless Bolts!
And you touched on something there, PennyBacker -- even for myself, a Steeler-loving kid who was around then, it's difficult to grasp how much everything in the Steelers universe changed that fall and then on that one gigantic play.
Our sensational rookie RB Franco had started breaking rushing records and had 6 straight hundred-yard games, the team finished the regular season with a franchise-record 11 wins, ranking 5th on offense and #2 in the league on D, and out here in the west, where (pre-internet, pre-satellite and cable sports, pre vcr/dvr etc.) we had been living under a virtual blackout on Steeler-related news (the Pirates, however, had some national cred, being a legit contender and having won the World Series the year before) ...
Now suddenly our team was showing up in the newspapers, on the tv news, on the cover of
Sport and in
SI magazines -- the Steelers had finally gained some attention, and man, when Andy Russell, Mean Joe and Franco came running out of the tunnel at San Diego, the feeling was that the superstars had rolled into town! (Unbeknownst to most at the time, Myron Cope and the
Franco's Italian Army guys had even arranged a meeting and photo-op with Franco and Frank Sinatra a couple days earlier at their Palm Springs practice facility - wow!)
So yeah, in this modern era, six Super Bowl victories later, where we in Steeler Nation now expect a contender every season, it's easy to miss just how historical and franchise-changing that season and that day really were (and as Swiss also notes, only a week later we had the sad, shocking news that Clemente, the Great One, had been lost at sea in a plane crash -- memorable days indeed).
