Super Bowl Memories #4: 'Wide Right'

 Though Super Bowl week is an annually painful reminder of how terrible my beloved Browns was, is and probably will continue to be into the untold future, I fashion myself an aficionado of football excellence--30-plus years of rooting for the Browns give you an appreciation of good football.  With that said, this list are the moments that have left an indelible mark on my psyche that bring back the who, what, when where and why of the Super Bowl party that I was in attendance when they happened.

Not all the moments are individual plays, but, instead, the lasting the impressions had on the historical perspective, my overall football sensibilities, and some were simply Super Bowl moments that stuck out to me.

The emotion of this game was intense with President George H.W. Bush declaring war on Iraq during Super Bowl week, marked the first time my generation was involved in a war.  And with friends and classmates who were spending their last days on American soil before deploying for Iraq, the National Anthem and the the Stealth Fighter planers zooming over the stadium as Whitney Houston hit the "land of the Free" high note took on a new meaning for me.




The Bills and Giants didn't disappoint on the field either.  Keep in mind, it was not rare to get a good Super Bowl game once every five years during this stretch that saw the NFC beat the AFC 13 straight years from the Raiders winning it in 1983 to the Denver Broncoes winning it in 1997.

Running the K-gun Offense (a combination of the spread offense and no-huddle offense) and spear-headed by the NFL all-time sack-leader Bruce Smith on defense, the Buffalo Bills steam-rolled their way to the Super Bowl by out-scoring Dan Marino and the Miami Dolphins in the snow of Buffalo 44-34 in the AFC Divisional round of the playoffs dismantling the Los Angeles Raiders  51-3 in the AFC Championship game the next week.

The Giants' road to the Super Bowl was less impressive when they shut down the quarterback-challenged Chicago Bears 31-3 in the NFC Divisional Round and beat the 49ers in Candlestick Park without scoring a touchdown,squeaking out a 15-13 win on five Matt Bahr field goals.

The game famously came down to Bill lining up for the winning 47-yard field goal that Scott Norwood just missed wide right.  The Bills went on to get destroyed in the next three Super Bowls, get the monicker of hard-luck losers, and become the punch-line for  late night talk show hosts for the rest of the decade.

If Norwood could have made that field goal, the fortunes of both franchises may have changed dramatically.