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In case of such an attack—and the organophosphate poisoning that would befall victims—an atropine injection was needed to combat the poison. The NFL purchased all the available atropine not reserved for the military. Those thousands of injection pens were stored inside Tampa Stadium, or in the pockets of medical staff, security supervisors, and usher captains.

“We tend to forget but it was a seminal moment in mass care and mass events. It transformed it,” said Martinez, an emergency room physician at Stanford University in 1991. “I thought we were going to get hit. I would have never considered a rocket coming in or anything like that. But having seen threat reports occur every day and seeing how low the threshold was to be a player . . . we were sitting ducks. With all respect to the Blackhawk [helicopter], they weren’t taking anybody down. They have a hard time taking down the guys flying [planes] with banners. To me, it was a perfect way for someone to do great damage.”

Martinez and the other health and safety personnel were just as concerned with the chaos that would inevitably follow that type of attack. A stampede during the hysteric exodus might be just as life threatening as the chemical warfare. Evacuation plans inside and around the Super Bowl site were paramount to the safety precautions. But before the crowd of more than seventy thousand people could even get into the stadium, they had to pass through security.

“That Super Bowl was a bit of a stand-alone situation, because the Gulf War came up, we went to war, we had to secure the stadium,” said Jerry Anderson, the NFL’s architectural advisor for the Super Bowl since 1983. “We did not go back to that level until 9/11. What it did, though, was start the thinking: what does it take to secure and then respond to a mass threat? And there were things we never contemplated before in a serious manner.”

X-ray machines, metal detectors, and security personnel patting people down guarded each of the sixty-eight gates. Cameras, camcorders, televisions, radios, beepers, and cell phones were all prohibited. Any bags or purses brought in by spectators were searched twice: first when they entered a bag-check area, and again when presenting tickets to the game. Even upon exiting their respective buses and approaching the locker rooms, all players and their equipment bags were subject to inspection by bomb-sniffing dogs.

“We’ve always had some presence for rapid response, but the degree of this was greatly enhanced,” said Anderson, who has also served as an advisor for several Olympics and World Cup events.

It was a pivotal moment because I think it changed how people were thinking about a mass-event situation with the new threat of terrorism as opposed to cults, criminal activity that we’d seen in the past. . . . I found it real interesting how we had to respond after 9/11 because, fortunately, we were already plugged in with the federal government because of the Salt Lake Olympics, and what happened with the NFL came so fast and furious and it was a brilliant plan. But it was a good thing that [Super Bowl XXV] had already paved the way for that.

The extra screening may have been a hassle and a reminder of the danger—“Usually, Americans don’t take to being searched or stopped,” Tampa policeman Brian Seely said on game day—but it was also a comfort.

“I’m real glad to see all the security,” said Harold Arlen of Bridgewater, New Jersey. “The more the better. I was kind of worried about coming to the game in the beginning. This may be the safest place in the world today.”

Eventually, the lines became extremely long, and the men and women in bright yellow jackets reading “Security” hurried their pace.

“It’s just taking too long,” a Tampa officer said an hour into working the gate. “They’d never get the crowd in on time, so they just stopped being as thorough with the metal detectors.”

Roughly an hour before kickoff, most of the spectators who paid $150 face value for their tickets had entered the stadium. And for