Top 100 momentsNo. 18
The Greatest Game Ever Played
Baltimore beats the Giants in sudden death on national TV. The NFL Championship makes football a living-room sport, and the Super Bowl era is coming.
December 28, 1958. Yankee Stadium. The Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants play for the NFL title. It goes to overtime — the first sudden-death championship in league history. Alan Ameche scores. The Colts win 23-17. Unitas is the quarterback. The country is watching on television.
Pro football had been a newspaper sport with a radio habit. After 1958 it is a living-room sport. CBS and then a merger and then a Super Bowl all follow the same logic: this game looks better than anything else on a Sunday.
They called it the Greatest Game Ever Played before the film was even cold. The name stuck because the league needed a creation myth for the TV age. This was it: overtime, New York, a fullback through the line, and a nation that did not change the channel.