Let the Replay Show Difference in Victory

A replay is being shown on the scoreboard of Three Rivers Stadium, but many of the Indianapolis Colts cannot bring themselves to look. Aaron Bailey cannot. He is the one who nearly caught the ball. Jim Harbaugh, who threw the ball, does watch. Harbaugh sees Bailey squeeze the ball with one hand, sees it pressed against Bailey’s chest.

Harbaugh, the Colt quarterback, turns to Brentson Buckner, a 305-pound Pittsburgh Steeler who tried to keep him from throwing the ball.

“I think he caught it,” Harbaugh says.

No, he has not.

The ball leaks from Bailey’s grasp. He is flat on his back, in the Pittsburgh end zone. One arm is pinned behind him. No fewer than three Steelers hover above him. One of them, Randy Fuller, is pawing at the ball. It trickles from Bailey’s chest . . . to his belt . . . to the ground. A scoreboard clock reads: 0.00. An official waves his arms: No catch.

Bailey hangs on, Indianapolis goes to the Super Bowl. He hangs on, it is a 29-yard touchdown pass, one that goes down in sports lore with Bill Mazeroski’s homer, Lorenzo Charles’ dunk, Franco Harris’ catch. He hangs on, the name Aaron Bailey is spoken from here to eternity, in Indiana with pride, in Pennsylvania with pain.

He caught one pass, the whole game.

He catches two, he’s a legend.

“It felt like it was all in slow motion,” says Bailey, a second-year pro from Louisville, accepting a 20-16 defeat Sunday that keeps the Colts from returning to the NFL championship game for the first time since Super Bowl V was won by the Baltimore Colts on another game-ending play, Jim O’Brien’s 32-yard kick.

“I had it for a split-second. I had one arm cradling the ball, but I couldn’t get my other arm free,” Bailey continues. “If I can get my other arm free, it might have been another immaculate reception at Three Rivers.”

Bailey stands bare-chested by his locker, a tattoo of a snorting bull on his left arm. It’s the first thing you notice. Second thing you notice, he is not a particularly tall man, 5 feet 10. Bailey is one of the shortest players on the Indianapolis squad.

Up he went, though, high as he knew how.

The play was strictly an up-for-grabs one, Harbaugh telling every receiver to go long, then letting fly. Were there an intended receiver, it would have been Brian Stablein, who is three inches taller than Bailey and “has the best vertical jump on the team,” Bailey says.

Harbaugh did his part.

“Last play, I just try to throw it up there, try to get it five yards deep into the end zone, to give him [any receiver] a chance,” says Harbaugh, who had to hurl the ball with a dislocated middle finger on his throwing hand, cracked during the final drive.

It was a prayer, one from a quarterback who drops to one knee and says one, every time he throws a pass for a touchdown.

Harbaugh is a believer.

“I believed we would win the whole time,” Harbaugh says. “I believed that before the game. All we had to do was play with courage.”

And find a hero.

Floyd Turner steps forward. With 8:46 remaining, the Colts come through with a 47-yard touchdown pass from Harbaugh to Turner that strikes Three Rivers like a thunderbolt. For the Steelers, it is last season’s San Diego game all over again. Blown coverage on a fourth-quarter pass is about to keep them from a Super Bowl.

With 6:29 left, Indianapolis has a 16-13 lead and the ball. Lamont Warren, the kid from Inglewood whose running had carried the Colts a long way, gets an incredibly lucky break. Taking a handoff from his nine, Warren has it slapped away, only to see it bounce into the hands of Joe Staysniak, a teammate.

Warren’s next break is not lucky.

On third and one from the 31, again he gets the call. A first down might give Indianapolis the game. But with 3:57 remaining, Warren takes a deep handoff and veers toward left tackle, saying later: “My eyes lit up. Nobody was in front of me.”

From the far side, however, a blitzing Steeler cornerback, Willie Williams, makes a dive and a shoestring tackle that stops Warren for no gain, forcing the Colts to punt.

Warren says, “It’s a play we hoped they wouldn’t blitz, one where the cornerback’s the only guy not accounted for.”

Indy punts, still needing a hero.

With 2 1/2 minutes to go, Quintin Coryatt, a Colt linebacker, steps directly into the path of a pass by Pittsburgh’s Neil O’Donnell that comes to him chest-high. Open field lies before him. So did a Super Bowl. But at the last instant, Coryatt’s left arm is hit by the intended receiver, Ernie Mills, and the pass falls incomplete.

Courage no longer counts. Pittsburgh scores. Only an immaculate reception can stop the Steelers now, like the one their own Harris once made. And here lies Bailey, trying to make one, in the very same end zone where last season’s AFC championship game against San Diego also had ended with an incomplete pass.

“It really hurts,” Bailey says. “It’s something I won’t ever forget. Not like, ‘Oh, I lost the game,’ or this or that. It’s just that I almost had it. I even tried to hide it from the referee, so he couldn’t see. But he made a good call.”

Harbaugh thought it was caught.

Even after the replay.

“All I know is, that’s the closest you can come without going to a Super Bowl,” Harbaugh says, shaking his head. “Close as it gets, close as it gets.”