Published October 28, 2024

Yesterday I saw one of the wildest finishes to any football game I’ve ever seen. I’ll bet some of you did too, or at least have heard about it.

It’s this play that gave the Washington Commanders a thrilling victory against the Chicago Bears.

You’ll have to watch in on YouTube. I’ve made it easy for you.

Okay, there’s a lot for me to talk about

Anyone who saw LSU beat Kentucky in 2002 on a 75-yard tipped Hail Mary pass surely flashed back to it if they saw that play yesterday. That Jayden Daniels played at LSU last year locked that in for sure.

The play 22 years ago became known as the Bluegrass Miracle. Videos are online.

Like yesterday’s final play in Landover, Maryland, LSU’s Hail Mary pass turned a three-point defeat into a three-point victory. (The game clock was at 0:00, so no reason to kick the point after touchdown.)

I was at that game in 2002 and reported on it. My story is on the Sports front page displayed on the Wikipedia page for the Bluegrass Miracle. It’s also on the walls in houses and man caves in Louisiana and elsewhere. I once read a framed copy of it that was encased in glass above a urinal in a sports bar’s restroom.

The Advocate, the paper I worked for, sold poster-size reproductions of that page. It did the same for a page we put together breaking down the play, which was called Dash Right 93 Berlin.

I don’t know why the Wikipedia page says it was a 74-yard play. It went from the LSU 25 to the Kentucky end zone. Seventy-five yards.

You could write a book about that play

Nick Saban, LSU’s coach in 2002, said “Berlin” a few times after the game, suggesting a World War II connotation. Football gets blitz from blitzkrieg, so it made sense. His explanation was not so problematic compared to Bill Parcells’ mention of similar plays using a different term he’d clearly connected to WWII.

In the interview room under the stands at what was called Commonwealth Stadium at the time, Saban voiced his irritation with LSU’s performance. He seemed to already know that winning that way would cause his team to relax, and that it would catch up with the Tigers.

A 31-0 LSU loss at home to Alabama a week later proved his prescience.

In a twist we should have seen coming, LSU’s SEC West championship hopes slipped past its misplayed prevent defense 20 days after the Bluegrass Miracle when Arkansas completed two dramatic late passes in a 21-20 victory that became known as the Miracle on Markham.

Things I still remember

I almost missed the Bluegrass Miracle. I’d bought a palm-sized TV so I could listen to the over-air announcers during games I covered, and it was misbehaving late in the game. I was fidgeting with it and looked up just in time.

The “Oh my God!” of co-worker Scott Rabalais is still fresh in my mind.

If the game had started later, I might have missed the play anyway. Catching the elevator down to field level from the press box for postgame interviews was always tricky. Would I have taken off early? The Pittsburgh Steelers’ owner missed the Immaculate Reception that way. Perhaps I’d have remembered that and chanced being late to the sidelines.

But the LSU-Kentucky game started at 11:30 a.m. Central, giving us plenty of time to meet our deadline for a Baton Rouge newspaper. I saw the pass go from right to left, just as those watching on TV did, followed by a most unexpected result.

And yet, I still almost missed the touchdown. The game clock expired while LSU quarterback Marcus Randall was rolling out to his right, and as he released the ball, Kentucky’s “victory fireworks” exploded into the air above the end zone to my right. After being briefly distracted, I looked back to pick up the flight of the ball and saw it tipped, then float above a Kentucky defender and into Devery Henderson’s arms. Touchdown. Victory for LSU.

We hustled down to field level, did our interviews and went back up to the press box to write our stories.

How do you put that into words?

Last night I had empathy for our writers as they wrote their accounts of the Bears-Commanders game on their laptops. It’s easy to feel pressure after such a finish.

My approach was to devote 90 percent of my story to that one play. The other 59 minutes, 58 seconds of the game would have to fit into the remaining 10 percent. So much happened. Aaron Boone caught three touchdown passes for Kentucky. No, not that Aaron Boone.

It was such an interesting game, and unexpectedly so. But the final play was everything.

That meant reducing an 86-yard punt by LSU’s Donnie Jones — yes, 86 yards, downed at Kentucky’s 1-yard line — to one item in a short story called a notebook. The punt could have been its own story, but that day, it became a footnote. Jones kicked it against a slight breeze, but once it cleared the lower level of the stadium, presumably hitching a ride on some quirky swirling winds, it rocketed upward and downfield. Then it rolled until an LSU player touched it at the 1.

Get this: It traveled 75 yards in the air before hitting the ground. The line of scrimmage was the LSU 13-yard line. Jones received the snap in the end zone.

I’ve seen only one other punt that impressed me as much as that one did.

My 2002 LSU-Kentucky story began by setting the scene: Kentucky fans running onto the field as the clock went to zero and Randall’s pass sailed downfield. And then:

But there was still the matter of the descent and resolution of Randall’s wing-and-a-prayer heave, which seemed to be no more than a doomed formality, the ultimate last-ditch act of duty and optimism on a Saturday afternoon which seemed destined to end with the Tigers licking their wounds after repeatedly shooting themselves in the foot.

Then everything became tangled up in blue — Kentucky’s celebration, its upset-in-the-making — before it literally slipped through the Wildcats’ hands, and legend bounded into the waiting hands of LSU wide receiver Devery Henderson.

Cliches aside, I think I did okay. The next day, a mom read the story to her two sons and emailed to tell me. She liked it that much.

Too many memories to tell them all

We got back on the plane, and I remembered that when we’d landed there in Lexington, Kentucky, a co-worker had asked me for a prediction. “LSU wins by three or loses by three,” I said. Considering the score was 30-27 Kentucky with two seconds left and 33-30 LSU with no time left after a miraculous final play, I think I nailed it.

The weird thing was, we’d been there the year before, when LSU had to drive 80 yards in 12 plays to beat Kentucky 29-25. Michael Clayton, who caught the winning touchdown pass from Rohan Davey in that game, had a hand in the Bluegrass Miracle a year later.

We put in close to a 20-hour work day for that 2001 game. Bad weather forced us to fly a different plane (the paper’s owners didn’t want to risk damaging the paint on their new plane, we were told), and that affected our flight path and how high we could fly. When we barely avoided a microburst on an unscheduled stop on the way home to refuel, we considered how we could have died to protect the jet’s paint job. Nice.

I felt sorry for one of our people when we finally got back to Baton Rouge. He couldn’t drive home right away because a cat had crawled up under his hood while we were away.

Another thing I remember is being chided by one of the paper’s editors for quoting Saban early in the week as saying LSU needed to take underdog Kentucky seriously. Meaningless coachspeak, they said.

Oh yeah? How’d that turn out? And have you met Nick Saban?

Saban knew what he was talking about in this quote in the Lexington Herald-Leader.

“This is two years in a row we won this game but did not defeat them,” he said.

Enjoy this one, kids

As I said, I rarely watch the NFL anymore, but I’ve taken an interest in Caleb Williams and the Bears because of Kerry Joseph (see the “punt” link). I had good football fortune when I learned that the Bears-Commanders game was being televised in the Portland market.

So I lucked out.

I hope kids who love Jayden Daniels and the Commanders ran around their neighborhoods shouting about the play and reenacting it afterward. I know a kid that did the same after Tom Dempsey’s field goal that gave the Saints a stunning victory over the Detroit Lions many years ago.

Dempsey’s kick was on the eighth day of November that year. The Bluegrass Miracle was on the ninth day of November in 2002. Billy Cannon’s famous punt return for LSU was on Halloween Night in 1959. What is it about late October and early November?

Enjoy it, kids of all ages.

Three plays before he threw the pass, Daniels began the drive by misfiring on first down. He didn’t seem fazed. I posted on LinkedIn when I saw a closeup of his face at that point.

“One thing I love about sports is watching someone ‘fail’ and then smile and try again.”

Three plays later, he was beaming. I’ll bet he still is.

I’ve seen that look before.