The “last” miracle?

The are few moments of one’s life that are so important to be worthy of the question “where were you when?…” 

In my case, I was at the student radio station at Rutgers University 30 years ago.  Watching the old Associated Press machine for updates of a hockey game being played in Lake Placid, New York.  Little did I know that 30 years later that hockey game would be seen as a defining moment for my generation. 

So many things have changed since then, especially in my chosen career path of communications.  Thirty years ago, ESPN was five months old, cable television was in its infancy and satellite TV didn’t exist, there was no “commercial” internet, no email, the first “1G” cell phone network was three years from coming online.  There was barely a fax machine. 

We used phones and mail.  We got our scores from newspapers and from dial-up sports services called “Sportsphone,” and from following the AP machine stored in a closet because it was an overgrown typewriter that made an incredible amount of noise. 

There was no multicast of the Olympics.  It was ABC and Jim McKay and the game was on tape delay that night.  In some markets, the local news broke in during the actual tape-delayed replay and ruined the results for those who were watching it and had avoided hearing the final score. 

Thirty years ago was about gas rationing and hostages.  It was about the Soviet Union and Jimmy Carter.  It was about the US getting its head handed to it on the world front.  Until…. 

Until…this group of college hockey players who averaged 22 years old beat the Russian hockey equivalent of the New York Yankees and turned the world upside down.  Then came Reagan, the hostages were freed, the wall came down and the rest is history. 

The world has changed.  You can tweet while watching hockey games, as I did last night, with thousands of your closest friends as far away as Texas and Toronto.  You can click to curling and ice dancing and be pissed that NBC didn’t offer the hockey match in HD. 

And you can watch interviews with Eruzione and Craig and Johnson and listen to Al Michaels one more time.  You can try to explain to those who weren’t born yet just how much it meant at the time and how much it means today.  

And how much things have changed, and how much you can’t imagine a “miracle” quite like that ever happening again.