No time for football

Starting in 1980, I would travel to Vermont to be with my sister and her family for Thanksgiving. The routine was to have turkey on Thursday and to go to a restaurant on Friday night. On one Thanksgiving, everything was uneventful until the Friday evening following Thanksgiving.

My sister made dinner reservations for 7:00 p.m. Our family was passing the time away that afternoon by watching football on television. It was getting close to when we had to leave to be on time at the restaurant and my sister was anxious to get going. As we were getting ready to go, we stopped to watch the last seconds of a game. There were no more than 30 seconds left in the game and we were dawdling so we could watch the end of the game. In a loud voice, my sister said, “Turn off the television!” To escape her wrath, we shut off the television.

After dinner, when we got back to the house, my nephew, who was 14 at the time, went downstairs to check the football scores. He came running up the stairs screaming and yelling at his mother. He was not at all happy with her but, to preserve family harmony, I will not repeat his utterances. The year was 1984 and what had happened, and what we had missed, was that Doug Flutie made his Hail Mary touchdown pass with no time left in the game to win for Boston College over Miami. We never saw it live as did millions of other viewers. This is an event that is always talked about every holiday season.