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A decade later


Sports, obviously, isn't the first thing that comes to mind when I think of 9/11. But the one sports figure I do associate with that awful day is Ed McCaffrey.

I'm not going to go into a "What I was doing on 9/11" post. I did that last year. I mentioned McCaffrey then, too. McCaffrey's broken leg, suffered making a spectacular catch in a Monday Night Football game against the Giants, is the last sports memory I, and a lot of sports fans, had before 9/11 took over. McCaffrey is our last link to normalcy.

On 9/11, I thought the events that I was experiencing were truly the beginning of the end. I really wanted to go back to the days of McCaffrey and Monday Night Football.

Ten years later, I think I know what 9/11 was. It was humanity on display. Humanity can be horrific and selfish. Humanity can be uplifting and selfless. We saw all of that on 9/11. It was a day when everyone, everywhere felt truly human, in all that the word entails.

Today, 10 years later, we go back to football -- it's opening day in the NFL. We'll celebrate the "superhuman" and roll around in hyperbole. We'll call games, events and achievements "unbelievable."

But those of us who lived through 9/11 know what "unbelievable" really is.

It happened 10 years ago. This very day. The day when we wished we could all go back to talking about Ed McCaffrey again.

Comments

Eric L said…
I was at that game. The catch was on the opposite side of the field from us, and they wouldn't show the replay on the jumbotron, which made us assume it was really bad. I never actually saw the play until about 3 years later when I decided to look it up on youtube.