Best Game Ever

On December 28, 1958, the New York Giants and Baltimore Colts met under the lights of Yankee Stadium for that seasons NFL Championship game. Football, growing in popularity amid Americas post-war economic boom, was still greatly over-shadowed by the countrys favored pastimebaseballbut the 1958 championship proved to be the turning point for pro football.On the field and roaming the sidelines were seventeen future Hall of Famers, including Colts stars Johnny Unitas, Raymond Berry, and Gino Marchetti, and Giants greats Frank Gifford, Sam Huff, and assistant coaches Vince Lombardi and Tom Landry.Played on a freezing Sunday evening in front of 64,000 fans and an estimated forty-five million television viewers around the countryat that time the largest crowd to have ever watched a football gamethe championship would become the first sudden-death contest in NFL history. With two minutes left in regulation, Baltimore had possession deep in its own territory, and the ball in the hands of the still unproven quarterback Johnny Unitas.The Best Game Ever is a brilliant portrait of how a single game changed the history of American sports.