Free The Hard Way on Purpose by David Giffels

glacial ice and it just hurt, all of it: the cold, the frustration, the brutal brotherhood of violence.
    By the fourth quarter, the thermos drinkers had fallen into bouts of slurred, profane nonsense, blasting racist spittle toward Plunkett. The game had continued in a series of jabs and punts and miscues. Sipe threw an interception. Reggie Rucker dropped a touchdown pass in the end zone. Cockroft missed a field goal. Plunkett was sacked and fumbled. Cockroft missed another. The Raiders crashed clumsily into the end zone.
    The Browns were down 14–12 with less than a minute to go. Finally finding a frantic groove, they had driven the ball to the Raiders’ 13-yard line. It was third down. Sipe called a time-out. Everyone in the stadium was standing, bobbing with anticipation. Eighty thousand of us. Although I was squeezed parka-to-parka among the men of my family, I didn’t feel warm, but I did feel something oddly similar to warmth: a shared coldness. Many of the seats in that ungainly stadium were “obstructed view,” and part of the nuance of viewing a game there was adjusting position to see around the rusty, paint-chipped posts and I beams supporting the upper decks. We were all huddled close, the swish of nylon against nylon, the heavy murmur of anticipation, all of us sharing a calculation of the odds. All we needed was a field goal. No farther than an extra point. Then hold the Raiders for the remaining few seconds and this will all have been worth it.
    The offense came back out onto the field. They lined up tight. Sipe raised his arms wide as he approached the line, trying to quiet the crowd. He leaned over the center, received the snap, looked across the end zone, drew back his arm, and released. The ball headed toward the goal line, toward the corner, toward tight end Ozzie Newsome, but it didn’t look right, didn’t zip through the air, was wobbling, caught up in the lake-effect wind, just long enough for a stumbling white jersey to cut in front of Newsome, the ball absorbed into the stickum-slathered arms of one of the Raiders, of someone who would be flying straight to California after this was done.
    Intercepted.
    The stadium fell silent. Browns players shrank from the celebration. The Raiders ran out the remaining seconds. It was over. Three weeks later they would win the Super Bowl. Everyone around us, wrapped in blankets and ponchos, looked dazed. What happened? We would soon learn that during the time-out, head coach Sam Rutigliano had called for a pass to the corner of the end zone, a play called Red Right 88. If no one was open, he’d told Sipe, “Throw it to the blonde in the second row.” That would leave one more play for the chip-shot field goal. But Sipe had tried to force the throw, and that was that. He tried because he believed, and that was the biggest mistake. He should have known.
    *  *  *
    But that’s what we do best. We believe. We come by this honestly. Because it’s not failure that we know. It’s something different, more complex, maybe worse: the feeling of almost winning.
    In the years that followed it would become galvanized truth.
    In 1987, the Browns played the Denver Broncos for the AFC Championship at old Municipal Stadium. With the clock ticking down and the Browns in the lead, John Elway led the Broncos on an impossible (not improbable; impossible ) 98-yard drive, which became known as The Drive, to win the right to go to the Super Bowl. It’s regarded as one of the worst defensive letdowns in pro football history.
    In 1988, the two teams met again in the AFC Championship. As the Browns were about to score a last-minute, game-tying touchdown, running back Earnest Byner fumbled at the 3-yard line to lose the game, in a turn of events that became known as The Fumble. The Broncos took over the ball with a minute remaining and went to the Super Bowl. It’s considered one of the most monumental collapses in pro