“Is it getting slightly heat in right here?” requested a fellow journalist sat subsequent to me perched excessive up within the rafters within the press field on the Superdome.
In hindsight now we all know why, however on the time we have been making an attempt to make sense of the choas on the pitch after the Ravens had simply taken a commanding lead.
The Superdome is loud, significantly loud. Even with the group cut up between the 2 groups, the roars and cheers have been nonetheless reverberating from under, ricocheting off the roof and hammering our ear drums.
Then it occurred. Our screens went off, the scoreboard disappeared, the stadium announcer’s booming voice was silenced and nearly all of the stadium’s lights went out.
Other than some emergency lighting, darkness engulfed the Superdome. And silence. Such an eerie expertise in such an enormous constructing.
A riotous cauldron of noise was became a shadowy cavern of nervous murmurings and disbelief – with no person having a clue what was occurring.
Gamers searched for his or her households within the stands, some stretched and a few simply sat down, bemused, as NFL officers ran about seeking to discover what the issue was, and the answer.
There was treasured little communication, as we tried to name, electronic mail, get in touch with somebody, someplace, with some information of the state of affairs.
As soon as the spectre of one thing extra threatening was dominated out, an influence outage was given as the explanation, and after probably the most well-known half an nighttime in American sports activities historical past, we have been able to get again underneath method.
The silence heard world wide was damaged, the blackout watched by a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands was over – however the story was very a lot not.