(You gotta love Johnny Bench being disqualified for “walking”.)

But the phrase that made me the happiest, simply knowing that some putz out there besides me has the words of Dick Enberg so indelibly etched in his brain that he must resort to Google to purge the demon echoes is that fateful line from Mattell’s Talking Football: “trap up the middle for ten uh oh penalty”. Such a dramatic turn—you were all set, had the trap play going right into your opponent’s prevent defense, it looked like you got the first down—and then you lose.

Stay tuned…I’m on the trail and will document everything fully as soon as I have something interesting to discuss.

For what it’s worth: TNF was written in 1980, and consists of 834 lines of Applesoft Basic. I’m considering doing a Ruby port (for my own edification) since I seem to be having no luck getting the original program to run in one of the many OS X emulators. I’m thinking that a literal port of it will be much fewer than 834 lines (although the Basic source contains many compound lines), but that the size could be greatly reduced after refactoring.