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What: “The Bravest Team: The Rebuilding of the FDNY Football Club”

Where: ESPN, tonight, 6

If you want to see football played in its purest form--for the love of sport, for camaraderie, for all the right reasons--you’ll see it in this one-hour NFL Films special.

On Sept. 11, 2001, the New York City Fire Department lost 343 men, among them seven active members and 15 former members of the department’s football team, which has been in existence for 30 years.

The special chronicles the emotional rebuilding of the FDNY team, called “The Bravest,” and climaxes with the annual game against the New York Police Department team, called “The Finest,” at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J.

“It’s our Army-Navy game,” says firefighter Phil Tufano.

Neil Walsh, the president of the FDNY team, says, “Once a year you get to hit a cop and not get locked up. That’s not too bad.”

Moving stories are told of some of the players who were lost, including quarterbacks Pat Lyons and Tom Cullen. Their widows, in separate interviews, talk about dealing with the tragedy of the terrorist attacks and what the football team and its players mean to them.

The FDNY’s season included games in San Diego and Orange County, and the team took a 3-1 record into the big game. If this had been a Hollywood movie, the fire-fighters team would have beaten the cops for the first time since 1993. But the police department, which has a pool of 40,000 from which to recruit, was just too big for the FDNY, which has a pool of 10,000. The NYPD won the big game, 10-0.

But in this case, the score doesn’t matter. This is more about the game of life than football.