Nothing tops the Flutie to Phelan Hail Mary in '84

	Flutie and Phelan were immortalized for their last-second heroics in the Orange Bowl. AP
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By Ian Thomsen

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To watch a game from the Orange Bowl pressbox in 1984 was like sitting behind a window atop a skyscraper penthouse. It was strangely quiet and disconnected from the field and noise outside, and the cheers seeped through in a muffled way as if the neighbors were listening to a live album in the apartment next door. You didn't feel as if you were there in the middle of it.

Neither Boston College nor Miami was going to win the national championship that year, yet it was a big game from where we sat the Friday after Thanksgiving. BC already had agreed to play in the Cotton Bowl and Miami had committed to the Fiesta Bowl, and because the two bowl games would be televised at the same time by competing networks, the advantage would go to the winner of this game.

It went back and forth all day with the two men from the Fiesta Bowl in their yellow sportcoats laughing and celebrating from the back row of the pressbox each time Miami took the lead, and Jim Brock of the Cotton Bowl responding to every BC score by pulling an enormous cigar out of his mouth and looking around the room with a big greeting smile. Brock was probably the most popular man in college football, a short middle-aged Texan with a round waist and an even more accommodating personality who wore cowboy hats and called everyone Hoss.

With 28 seconds left in the game, the men from the Fiesta Bowl couldn't stop giggling and squealing. Their whispered celebrations were just loud enough to let everyone know that quarterback Bernie Kosar had clinched the game by leading Miami on a touchdown drive from his 10-yard line to seize a 45-41 lead. Brock, who was sitting along my row, was muttering about his rivals. With six seconds remaining BC had worked the ball to midfield, 48 yards from the end zone.

Here was the thing about what happened next. I was working for the Boston Globe at the time, and in the two decades since I've never heard of anybody in New England walking away from the TV or changing the channel when BC fell behind. Unlike the Red Sox, people believed Doug Flutie might find a way to win this game. His performances over his final two years for BC remain the most entertaining of anyone I've ever seen. He made easy things look difficult, hard things look simple, and the impossible, when you thought about it later, seemed almost predictable.

Flutie, all 5-foot-9 of him, rolled out to his right and slingshot his entire body as javeliners do at the Olympics. Miami defenders did not imagine he could throw that far. The ball landed over their outstretched arms and disappeared. We didn't see it. There was a gasping quiet for a long time in the pressbox when somebody said, "He caught it.''

Anticlimactically, the rest of us started laughing and cheering, not for the victory but for the moment. The whole BC team swarmed around Flutie's receiver, Gerard Phelan, when to my right I heard a loud groan. I looked over to see Brock collapsing onto the press table in front of him. He had presciently decided to get rid of the cigar before the final play. Otherwise, it might have been stuffed halfway down his throat.

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