Down To The Final Second For Super End
When Super Bowl XXXIV reached its pulsating climax Sunday, the thin margin separating the St. Louis Rams and Tennessee Titans measured 36 inches. The Titans didn’t make it.
A Super Bowl of escalating drama reached a crescendo on the last play of the game - a play that ended with Tennessee a single wrenching yard short of extending the event into its first overtime. Instead, this became the first Super Bowl whose outcome dangled until the absolute final second.
- Frank Luksa, Dallas Morning News
It was a pass that defied reality, a long, soaring spiral that not only stretched across the Georgia Dome’s smooth, green carpet, but across a couple of rich Rams’ generations.
It seemed only fitting that Kurt Warner’s Magical Mystery Tour would end like this, on a 73-yard touchdown bomb with 1 minute, 54 seconds left in the game to complete the cycle.
To turn him from supermarket grocery clerk to Super Bowl hero. To take him from the depths of the Arena League to the pinnacle of pro football.
Steve Bisheff, Orange County Register
Across the field, Kurt Warner fired his arms to the sky. The grocery store stock boy hadn’t turned into a pumpkin in Super Bowl XXXIV, he had turned into the MVP, passing for a Super Bowl record 414 yards and two touchdowns. Minutes earlier, the huge arms of Titans defensive end Jevon Kearse crashed down on Warner, crushed him to the carpet, and lying on his back, the roar of the dome crowd told Warner the truth: touchdown, St. Louis. This was his Super Bowl, his season, his storybook ending.
Adrian Wojnarowski, The Record Cut!
That’s a wrap!
Great job on the final scene, Kurt. Your delivery. Your expressions. Especially your timing in being buried like your career was once just as you threw that winning Super Bowl pass. Beautiful stuff, babe! And then climbing the Georgia Dome stairs to kiss your wife. I hear Oscar calling!
Dave Hyde, Sun-Sentinel
So you can go back in time, after all.
And if you can’t change history, well, at least you can take some of the sting out of it.
Haunted by a Super Bowl he didn’t win as coach of the Eagles, Dick Vermeil won one as coach of the St. Louis Rams Sunday night. Tortured and tormented and feeling unfulfilled, he had waited 19 years for redemption. He redefined persistence.
Afterward, he hugged everyone in reach and in sight, and if he hasn’t gotten around to you yet, there is apt to be a knock at your door momentarily.
Bill Lyon, Knight Ridder News
The world’s most renowned stock clerk has reached the very top shelf. Kurt Warner completed his remarkable up-from-the-produce-aisle story at the Georgia Dome on Sunday, taking with him the rest of the itinerant Rams and the city that took them in.
The Rams had to win this one, because the quarterback’s story had to run its inevitable course.
Steve Hummer, Cox News
One excruciating yard.
Four stadiums, three cities, two states in four years and one yard. There may never be a team that has to fight that kind of adversity again to get to the Super Bowl and then come so painfully close to winning it.
Greg Myers, New York Daily News
About 20 seconds after the game ended, fireworks were set off in the Georgia Dome. The truth is they had been going off for some time.
Tom Sorensen, Knight Ridder News