January 8th, 2000. The Bills and Titans are playing in an AFC Wild Card game. This Titans team was an NFL Blitz / Madden dream. Steve McNair at QB, Eddie George, Kevin Dyson and Frank Wycheck as the primary weapons and at the time some of the coolest jerseys in the league.
I was at The Hitting Streak. A batting cage off I-270 in Gaithersburg, Maryland with my dad, honing what would a short-lived and underwhelming baseball career.
They had one of those mounted TVs in one of the corners you would typically see at a bar. 15 people were gathered around watching the game end and 8 year old me was stupefied but what I saw. This was a video game play. Frankly even more surreal, you couldn’t even do this in a game.
For years, teams would mimic this play with some subtle variations but none had that moment of shock of witnessing something never seen before. Remnants of the alley-oop scene in Semi Pro.
Often lost in our memory was the Bills benching Doug Flutie for Rob Johnson at the command of owner Ralph Wilson. Wilson was a notoriously ornery owner and it’s amazing that in the year 2000, foolish pride could have such an impact on something as large as an NFL team in a playoff game (Rob Johnson was the young draft pick with high promise and Wilson wanted to him to prove it on the big stage despite Flutie being the successful starter all year).
Ironically this Titans season ended so memorably on the 1 yard line in the Super Bowl. Truly a sports moment in history that made it feel like these events are decided by fate rather than coincidence.
The Kurt Warner-Rams were champions that year and definitely have a deeply ingrained legacy in NFL history but nothing they ever accomplished rivals the lure of the Music City Miracle.
Who Cares Sports 