With a towel draped around his neck like a prizefighter, Donovan McNabb stood off to the side of the field, pacing, almost prowling, aching for just one more shot.
The clock was ticking without mercy. Super Bowl XXXIX was running out of time, and so was he.
McNabb had marched a bone-weary Philadelphia Eagles team 79 yards to a score with 1 minute 48 seconds to play, making it 24-21. But he needed to get a football back in his hands one more time. It would be his only chance to write a new ending to a game that the New England Patriots had seemed to have in the palms of their hands.
A product of Chicagoland, a fan favorite in Philadelphia, he was out there giving the Eagles everything he had. McNabb threw for three touchdowns, and his 357 yards passing Sunday tied Joe Montana for third most in Super Bowl history.
If there was any way for the Eagles to win an NFL cha for the first time in 45 years, McNabb was the man to make it happen.
For three quarters, he and the Eagles fought the heavily favored Patriots to a 14-14 standoff–the first time a Super Bowl was still tied at that point–so it was anybody’s ballgame.
But just under a minute remained when the Patriots’ Josh Miller got off a punt. And the unluckiest bounce of the day for the Eagles left the ball buried inside their own 5-yard line.
McNabb had all of 46 seconds to pull something out of the green baseball cap he wore on the sideline. He peeled off the towel and reached for his helmet. Teammates patted him atop it as he took the field for a last crack at making history.
His teammates were dragging. Particularly his receivers, who were exhausted or hurting in a variety of ways.
His tight end, L.J. Smith, who was filling in for the injured Chad Lewis, had been banged up since taking a hard hit in the first quarter. Wide receiver Todd Pinkston suffered leg cramps and had to leave the field for the locker room during the Eagles’ fourth-quarter touchdown drive.
And then, of course, there was the amazing Terrell Owens, a man whose legs were in such sorry shape that he wasn’t supposed to be out there at all.
Owens had stopped at nothing to find a cure. He used a device called a hyperbaric chamber–the type used by bike racer Lance Armstrong and other athletes–to increase oxygen flow to his body and reduce swelling to the ankle.
On the eve of the game, Owens even paid a visit to the hotel room of singer Patti LaBelle, a diehard Philadelphia sports fan. LaBelle sang to him, trying to soothe his aches and pains.
As a healing process, it worked miracles. Owens caught nine passes for 122 yards. He was so ready to play, McNabb’s first three pass attempts of the game came T.O.’s way.
But in the final, desperate minute, McNabb was looking for anybody and everybody. He even looked for Freddie Mitchell, the blabbermouth wide receiver who had taunted the Patriots before the game. Mitchell did next to nothing in the Super Bowl, except stare daggers at an Eagles fan who screamed at him late in the game, “Freddie, man, catch something!”
McNabb dropped back into his own end zone and dumped a pass to running back Brian Westbrook. But he could get no farther than his own 5, and the merciless clock kept going.
And then it all came to an end, McNabb aiming a pass down the middle that the Patriots’ Rodney Harrison picked off. One guy from Chicago’s south suburbs killed the hopes of another.
For all his good intentions and statistics, McNabb also was guilty of three interceptions.
“If not for those,” he said later, “we probably could have been up by two or three touchdowns. We could have been up 14-0 at the half. But it’s woulda, coulda, shoulda.”
He left empty-handed while Patriots quarterback Tom Brady walked away with a third Super Bowl title.
Said McNabb with a sigh, “As a quarterback in the NFL, you want what Tom Brady has.”
He had done the best he could, overcoming a shaky start to get the Eagles back into the game.
“We had to keep guys coming at him at all times,” Patriots linebacker Willie McGinest said. “The key was confusing him. Anytime you let a guy like Donovan sit back there and throw passes, he’ll pick you apart.”
McNabb didn’t get what he wanted most–didn’t get what Brady has–but he also didn’t go away discouraged.
“I’m going to keep my head up high, not low,” he said. “It’s still a successful year, definitely. All the challenges we faced, people talking about what we weren’t going to be able to do . . . we did a lot. We won our conference, we made it to the Super Bowl. I think it’s a been wonderful year.”
