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Now, Lawrence is not on the field-goal block team. I’m thinking, “Oh shoot, here goes Lawrence, we’re going to have twelve on the field.” But Lawrence sends somebody off. So now we’ve got eleven on the field, I think, I can’t really tell . . . but we’ve got Lawrence out there, who’s not on the field-goal block team. I’m thinking, “I’m gonna let this pass, I’m not gonna make a big deal of this.” It wasn’t like Joe Schmo the Ragman.

After the game, I go up to Lawrence and I say, “Lawrence, what were you doing out on the field on the field goal block team when you’re not on it?” He says, “I wanted to be on the field when the game was decided.” I thought, “What a great answer.”

For Matt Bahr’s last-second game-winner in the NFC Championship Game against San Francisco, Taylor had been on the field as the kicking unit’s left wing. Perhaps, he simply wanted to be in the same place, on the field, rather than on the sidelines.

Coincidently, a handful of his teammates also assumed a spot resembling their place along the sideline a week earlier at Candlestick Park. At least one bended-knee prayer group—Pepper Johnson, Greg Jackson, Mark Collins—was too nervous or too antsy to view the fate of a game-winning field goal attempt. Their anxieties were slightly eased knowing that no one would be there to narrate the moment. Everson Walls was part of the unit trying to block the kick.

Parcells, however, felt no comfort. His mind was clouded with one lingering regret: the decision during the Giants’ previous offensive series, on third and one, to run the shotgun draw with Jeff Hostetler instead of throwing a pass to Mark Bavaro.

“When they were lining up to kick that field goal,” Parcells remembered twenty years later. “I’m saying to myself: ‘You know Parcells, if you just had a little more balls you might not be in this situation. Nobody knows that—no one. Not any of the [assistant] coaches don’t really know it. But when you’re alone with your innermost thoughts and you’re trying to think about things that you did and didn’t do, that’s the major play decision in that game, for me.”

As Parcells stewed, more than a dozen Bills players and coaches—Kelly, Lofton, Levy, Smith, Reed, Tasker, Carlton Bailey—joined hands. Others peeled off, away from the group to be alone.

Norwood, standing far from the other ten Bills players on the field-goal unit, continued to focus and practice. Eventually, the unit broke the huddle, and Bills long-snapper Adam Lingner—who spent his off-seasons pursuing a modeling career—bent down and gripped the football with both hands. His teammates crowded beside him, forming a human fence to protect against the soon-to-be charging Giants defenders. Seven yards behind Lingner, holder Frank Reich knelt and tamped down a small patch of grass on the field’s chewed-up sod. This was where he would place the ball.

Norwood marked off his precise starting point—three paces backward, two to his left—then angled himself toward Reich. Slightly bent at the waist, Norwood shrugged out his shoulders and nodded at Reich. He was ready.

“The quiet man of this football team, Scott Norwood, he can fire ‘the shot heard ’round the world’ now,” shouted play-by-play voice Van Miller, as he set the scene for tense Bills fans listening on radios back in Buffalo. “Here we go, with eight seconds to play, high drama here in the Super Bowl.”

Norwood nodded to Reich, who, in turn, shouted out a signal to Lingner, letting him know to snap the ball momentarily.

Lingner fired the ball back to Reich. Instantaneously, a swarm of Giants bolted across the scrimmage line. Reich could see them out of the corner of his right eye, desperately trying to stop the kick. The Giants’ Roger Brown eluded wingman Steve Tasker while Dave Duerson had bowled over Bills blocker Butch Rolle. But neither came close enough to disrupt the kick. The Bills’ barrier resisted. Reich handled the snap cleanly, placed it on the ground—precisely to the desired “eighth of an inch”—and Norwood swiped at the football with his powerful