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“It just makes you reminisce, like what it took to get to that point,” he said. “You thank a lot of people for getting you there.”

While Baker took advantage of the hotel’s complementary long-distance calls, the rest of New York’s roster and coaching staff tried to fill the morning as well. The team bus didn’t leave the Hyatt until roughly noon.

“I hate waiting,” Bill Parcells told a reporter, while sipping coffee in the lobby with his high school basketball coach Mickey Corcoran and Giants veteran Matt Cavanaugh. “Every game should be at 1 o’clock in the afternoon.”

Three miles down the road at the Hilton, Bills players attended chapel services, mingled with friends and family, or just killed time before eating their pregame meal of “spaghetti, baked potatoes, and other foods high in carbohydrates.” Late in the morning, their team bus left.

“The ride to the stadium was unbelievably moving,” Bill Polian remembered. “We took that same route and had a police escort, obviously, and we were moving slowly. And both sides of Dale Mabry Boulevard were lined with Bills fans who, it was obvious after a little bit, had come out to watch the buses go by. Now they weren’t tailgating; they weren’t in the parking lot; they were out there to watch the buses go by. And they had signs, and they were waving and cheering; it was just incredibly emotional.”

Giants (several wearing white tee shirts that read “Show No Mercy”) and Bills players got off their respective buses and headed into the locker rooms to relax, tape up, and suit up. Others walked across the grass at Tampa Stadium, in an attempt to burn off nervous energy.

As players dressed, members of both teams’ coaching staffs—such as Bill Belichick and linebackers coach Al Groh—surveyed the field and discussed last-minute details.

“I told Charlie and Rac that we’ll get together and go in there and go over it,” Belichick said to Groh.

“I talked to Banks and Lawrence, and I’m gonna talk to Pepper here in a minute that we’re probably gonna open in the dime,” said Groh. “What I want to make sure of is that those two inside guys have the proper pad fit, ’cause they have the gap all by themselves this week.”

“Right, okay,” Belichick acknowledged.

While Belichick, Groh, Rac (defensive line coach Romeo Crennel), Charlie (special assistant Charlie Weis), and the rest of the defensive staff met in the locker room, a few Giants and Bills exited the players’ tunnel: kickers and other specialists at 4:45, the full team ten minutes later.

Their forty-five-minute warm-up and run-through finished, all players and coaches were ordered off the field at 5:35 so the pregame entertainment could begin: Up with People, and members of The Temptations and Three Dog Night, performed for ten minutes.

For the millions at home that tuned in to ABC to see football, not a concert, the next segment of the pregame show was for them.

Long before the Bills and Giants earned the right to play for the world championship, one team had already been invited to appear that day at Tampa Stadium.

The twenty-fifth installment of the Super Bowl was a ready-made milestone. To celebrate the first quarter century of the championship, an all-time Super Bowl team was selected, beginning in the summer of 1990. A group of media members and league officials who had witnessed every Super Bowl named 105 of the game’s greatest players and coaches for the honorary squad. Over one million fans voted on the nominees throughout the NFL season and in the end, 25 players were chosen.

“First of all, this was very surprising to me,” said Willie Wood, the Packers great safety. “I didn’t think we old-timers had a chance to be on a team like this. I figured people kind of forgot about us.”

On the day before Super Bowl XXV, the team was honored during Tampa’s annual Bamboleo Festival, an African-Cuban themed celebration featuring floats, bands, and dancing. Roughly 150,000 people stood in cold weather and light rain to watch the two-and-a-half-mile parade down Bayshore Boulevard.