Immaculate Reception - on further review...

Dan sends along a couple of good links:

This one from October 4 and this follow-up article two weeks later.

As a Raiders' partisan, I can still remember how things unfolded: at Aunt Marie's house for a Christmas gathering, Mark, Merle, and I (and probably a few other siblings and/or cousins) were upstairs in Merle's 2nd floor bedroom, watching on a tiny TV. When Ken Stabler scrambled for the go-ahead TD, we jumped up and down so much that Merle's bed broke. The screaming caused my mother, a Raiders' fan because of Daryle Lamonica, to run upstairs to see what was happening (she was downstairs only because she was helping to get the meal on the table - if she had had her way, she would have been up there with us the whole time). She screamed with joy when she learned the Raiders had taken the lead, and went back downstairs.

Shortly thereafter, a glum group of disappointed Raiders' fans came down to dinner, in stunned disbelief over what had just occurred. I remember being mad at the Raiders' d-back for not tackling Franco by pushing him out of bounds. I remember Merle being livid. Mark was actually pretty even-keeled - not happy, but not as emotionally distraught as the others. I remember him saying to me, quite calmly, about the d-back "You can't really blame him".

And then there were those at the table asking what happened. How do you answer that question under those circumstances? It was an unhappy Christmas feast, and I also remember my dad consoling us. The funny thing is that the Raiders were "Marks' team", so to be a typical little brother, I had to pick a different team. My team was the Dolphins - I still recall the monthly student reader brochure that we would use to order books, which usually cost less than a buck. We would order 4 or 6 at a time and it wouldn't cost more than $5. I distinctly remember ordering the Miami Dolphins book, which pictured Bob Griese handing off to Larry Csonka on the cover. I don't know what kind of relationship Mark and I would have had if the Dolphins and Raiders had met in the title game that year.

I will also admit to drifting Raiders-ward as the decade went on, and I did pull for the Raiders in that famous win over Miami where Stabler shot putted the ball as he was being tackled by Vern Den Herder, and Clarence Davis somehow emerging with the ball in the endzone. I think I left my Dolphandom that day for good, and when so many Dolphins left for the WFL, that was the nail in the coffin. I haven't liked the Dolphins since. In fact, one of my favorite Vermeil-era wins was a 17-3 manhandling of the 'phins by the '78 Eagles at the Vet - that game signaled to a lot of non-believers that the Eagles had arrived.

PS: While writing this, Dan sent additional links, this one to the story of how the play was named and this one on Frenchy Fuqua's reticence.