A Day We’ll Never Forget

September 11, 2001

It was a beautiful morning along the East Coast. One of those September mornings that fools you into believing summer isn’t quite ready to pack up and leave. Blue skies. Crisp air. Not a cloud to be found.

Then came 8:46 a.m.

A plane strikes the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

I’ll be honest with you. My first thought wasn’t terrorism. I was one of many who figured it was a small plane, something like the single-engine Piper that John F. Kennedy Jr. was piloting when it went down off Martha’s Vineyard two summers earlier. An inexperienced pilot. A bad read of the conditions. Lost control. A tragedy, no doubt, but an accident.

Then the footage surfaced.

This was not a single-engine prop plane. This was a commercial airliner, American Airlines Flight 11 out of Boston. This was not an accident.

This was an act of terrorism.

Seventeen minutes later, at 9:03, another plane struck. This time it was United Airlines Flight 175, and this time it was the South Tower. It happened on live television, in front of millions of us, and any doubt that remained vanished in a ball of fire. We weren’t watching a disaster. We were watching an attack on America.

And the terrorists weren’t finished.

At 9:37, American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the Pentagon, just across the Potomac from the nation’s capital. New York wasn’t enough for them. They wanted the nerve center of our military. They wanted the symbols of who we are.

At 9:59, the South Tower collapsed. At 10:28, the North Tower followed. Less than 90 minutes after the second plane hit, the twin giants that had defined the Manhattan skyline for a generation were nothing more than a ginormous pile of twisted steel, pulverized concrete and dust.

By day’s end, the attacks had claimed the lives of 2,977 innocent people: in the towers and on the streets of Lower Manhattan, inside the Pentagon, and in a field in western Pennsylvania.

That field is a story all its own.

I can’t even imagine what it must have been like to be on those planes. The terror. The chaos. The morbid realization, somewhere over the country you called home, that death was imminent. Some passengers and crew members grabbed phones and called loved ones to say their goodbyes. Think about that for a moment. Think about the courage it takes to keep your voice steady long enough to tell someone you love them one last time.

Others refused to go quietly.

United Airlines Flight 93 left Newark bound for San Francisco. Hijackers took control and turned it back east, toward Washington. Through those phone calls, the 40 passengers and crew members on board learned what had already happened in New York. They understood exactly what their flight had become: not a trip to the West Coast, but a weapon aimed at killing more Americans.

So they fought back.

Passenger Todd Beamer was heard on an open line saying, “Let’s roll.” Moments later, at 10:03, Flight 93 went down near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Everyone aboard was killed. Nobody on the ground was.

We talk a lot in this business about heart, about players who leave it all on the field. With all due respect to every warrior who has ever strapped on a helmet, that phrase belongs to the 40. They sacrificed everything so that people they would never meet could go home that night.

Back in New York, while so many ran away from the danger, others ran straight toward it.

We watched in stunned silence as first responders put their lives at risk to honor a vow: to protect and to save those who needed their help. They climbed stairwells as tens of thousands of people made their way down. Many perished alongside the very people they were trying to save, including 343 firefighters of the FDNY, 23 officers of the NYPD and 37 officers of the Port Authority Police Department. Others made it out, and thanks to them, so did countless civilians who otherwise would not have.

That’s what a vow looks like when it’s tested.

In the days that followed, even sports took a knee. The NFL postponed its games that weekend, and here in Baltimore, where the purple runs deep and the defending Super Bowl champs had just opened their season, nobody complained. Football didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except each other.

When the games returned, they felt different. Flags stretched across entire fields. Strangers in rival jerseys sang the national anthem side by side. For a little while, there were no red states or blue states, no us and them. There was just us.

Every year since, we’re reminded of this horrific day. This year marks 25 of them. A child born on September 12, 2001, turns 25 tomorrow, which means an entire generation of adults has only read about that morning in history books.

Those of us who lived through it carry it differently. This unforgettable and heinous strike against America will forever be burned into our minds, our hearts and our souls.

And perhaps in our reminiscing, we can also remember what made our country great in the aftermath. We remember the long lines at blood banks. The flags on every porch. The neighbors checking on neighbors. We remember what we are capable of accomplishing when we come together as one.

It can be that way again.

But what will unify us? Will it take another monumental tragedy for us to realize that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts? Any coach worth his whistle will tell you that a locker room divided against itself doesn’t win anything. A country isn’t much different.

I hope we remember again today. I hope we pray for better days for our nation. And I hope we can get back to practicing the immortal words of our pledge of allegiance: “one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Never forget.

God bless America.

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