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Everything has changed
I have heard the phrase spoken so many times in the last 10 days: We will never be the same. And the thought made sense, although only in some abstract way that I couldn't touch or wrap my words around. I am sure that we will never be the same -- but until last Sunday, I didn't quite know what that meant. Then I spent that afternoon at the Staten Island, N.Y., home of New England Patriots offensive guard Joe Andruzzi's parents, Bill and Mary Ann, reporting a story for this week's issue of Sports Illustrated. Joe was there, too, with his older brothers, Billy and Jimmy, his uncle Daniel, and his 78-year-old grandmother, Theresa. Joe is a professional football player, but all three of his brothers ( Marc was searching through the rubble at the World Trade Center) are New York City firemen. I won't repeat all the details of the magazine's piece. Suffice it to say that Jimmy Andruzzi, 30 years old, was among the first responders to the World Trade Center on Tuesday, Sept. 11. He was inside the building and only escaped through a remarkably fortuitous sequence of events that brought him onto the street roughly 45 seconds before the Tower 1 collapsed. Many, many of his brothers in the Fire Department of New York are gone. Jimmy told me this story while his family listened. Everybody cried at least a little, me included, but Jimmy cried the loudest and longest. And deservedly so. In the end, his family hoped that telling the story would in some small way help Jimmy move a little closer toward emerging from a long, dark tunnel. It will take time. It will take time for many of them. A while later I sat outside the Andruzzi home with Joe. His family calls him Joey and that's neat, because he is a Joey, not a Joe. He's big and warm, at least away from the field, outside his pads. I cover sports for a living, but none of us covers all of sports, because it is too large a world. I knew Joe Andruzzi started for the Pats, and that he had grown up in Staten Island and gone to tiny Southern Connecticut State. That's really all I knew. In the cool sunshine of a fall morning, Joe and I talked football. Turns out he made the squad of the Super Bowl champion Packers in '97 as a rookie free agent. Last year Green Bay released him. He's had three surgeries on his right knee and one on his right shoulder. "The Packers said I was injury-prone," said Joey. "When 600 pounds fall on your knee and it gives out, that's not injury-prone." He caught on with the Pats and was a starter before he could get unpacked. He's known around the league as a tough customer, a rugged player down inside. In preparing to meet -- and interview -- this beautiful family, I was certain that at some point I would have to ask Joey to explain what it felt like to be sitting in his family's house on a Sunday afternoon during the NFL season. By the time I was ready to leave, there was no need to ask the question. It felt wonderful. And it felt terrible. His brother alive by an act of providence, so many others gone. Dinner on the table, near newspapers with photos of the missing. I thought he and I would both feel as if we should be sitting in a stadium somewhere, he playing, me watching (not to equate the two). But neither of us felt that way. Something was different. And that's what the phrase means. Never be the same again. Sports Illustrated senior writer Tim Layden is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com. Click here to send him a question or comment.
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