Of all of the heart wrenching Paul Allen Viking calls over the years, this might be my favorite. I mean I think I might be borderline turned on when he unleashes that blood curdling, 'NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!' after 'CAUGHT! TOUCHDOWN!' Anytime I'm down in the dumps I just replay that call and I'm like Costanza after he eats a piece of mango:
Story time, let's get in the DeLorean, gun it to 88mph, and whisk you away to 2003. A calmer time, a simpler time. A time before cell phones were basically an appendage, TV's were in standard def, and Wikipedia was a trusted source you could use on term papers.
(click play, some assembly required in this blog)
For Christmas that year, my sister, Cortney, got me and my dad tickets to the regular season finale for the Packers. Packers/Broncos, December 28th in the year of our Lord, 2003. Up until that point, I had never been inside Lambeau Field. This was going to be my first ever Lambeau Field/Packer game experience. When I opened that envelope on Christmas morning and saw the tickets inside I looked like one of those
fainting goats
you see on Facebook. Just intermittently hopping around room and fainting every other second.
So some of you may remember the end of that 2003 season was pretty epic. The Packers were on the fringe of the playoff picture with pretty long odds in the final weeks. The second to last game was the Monday Nighter in Oakland, the day after Irv Favre passed away. The Packers basically won a Disney movie that night, which made the final week of the season relevant.
Still though, the odds weren't great. The Packers needed a win over Denver and needed a three win Cardinal team to knock off a Viking team prepped to win the division. So my dad and I headed to Lambeau, got to our seats (row 1, 20 yard line) and settled into the Cathedral of Football. The Packers beat the brakes off of Denver that day, 31-3, and once it became clear that the game's outcome had been decided, attention turned to the desert.
Now, again, it's 2003. Monitoring scores at other games now is so easy it's silly. If my phone takes even a split second extra to load a score I get fussy. It's hard to remember a time when you didn't have the score of every game, in real time, at your fingertips. But we didn't. My family had a SINGLE cell phone in our house, my mom's Nokia. It was forest green and weighed 7.2 pounds. But I had it so that I could call, not text, but CALL, my buddy Paul to get me updates on the Cardinal/Viking game. Late in that game I called him and he said something to the effect of 'it's not looking good, probably over.' So being one of the few people in our section that had a phone and access to information, once I hung up, people turned to me for information. I told them it was 'over.' Hindsight being 20/20, I wish I would have used more vague language.
Because as we learned, it wasn't over! Honest to God, and this is something you will never see again for a variety of reasons, someone in a section directly across from ours had an actual radio on them. Wayne Larrivee, also realizing that the only game that now mattered was the Cardinal/Viking game, started doing play by play of that game from their monitors in the booth. Suddenly, a surge of cheering game from the section of fans with the radio and started to spread like an actual wave. When it got to us, we learned that the impossible had happened, on the last second, Josh freaking McCown found Nate Poole in the corner of the endzone for a walkoff touchdown! The Packers made the playoffs in the most unlikely of scenarios. The party was on!
The only problem I had was the small mutiny around me when someone started asking, 'WHO SAID IT WAS OVER?! I THOUGHT SOMEONE TOLD US THE GAME WAS OVER!!' I knew he was talking about the misinformation (the first fake news!) that I had spread minutes ago, and I knew that I had to do the right thing. So I did just that. I pointed to some sap next to me and said 'THAT GUY SAID IT WAS OVER!' and walked the other way.
Scene.
PS: The following week was this play against the Seahawks:
Between the Irv Favre storyline, the way they got in, and the way they won this game, I had never been more sure a Packer team was a team of destiny.
Double PS: Fun fact: Josh McCown has the highest passer rating in Bears history.
