VANCOUVER — Seth MacFarlane, the creator of Family Guy, cheated death on 9/11, when terrorists struck the World Trade Center in New York, because of a hangover. He slept in, ran late, and missed his fateful flight.

“We need to feel that something was meant to be,” MacFarlane told Penthouse magazine. “It’s a lot of horse (bleep).This is not the first flight I missed for being a little too party-hearty the night before.”

Decades later, however, the memory of a doomed flight on which her future husband, Edmonton Eskimos fullback Normie Kwong, was supposed to have been a passenger still haunts his wife, Mary.

“I tried to block out the memory,” she said in a telephone interview. “It was a shock at the time. Fifty-six years later, it’s still scary. I wouldn’t have gotten married to Norman. My (four) boys wouldn’t be here. The crash still comes up from time to time. I think not only about the players who were killed, but all those people.”

The crash of Trans-Canada Airlines flight No. 810 on Mount Slesse, near Chilliwack, is the latest installment of the eight-part TSN series, Engraved On a Nation, to be aired on Friday evening. The series runs in conjunction with a celebration of the 100th Grey Cup game, scheduled for Toronto on Nov. 25.

Fate and football were inextricably entwined on Dec. 9, 1956, when players headed to Vancouver airport for a flight to Calgary following the East-West all-star game at Empire Stadium. Stars of the day such as Bud Grant, Bob McNamara, Jackie Parker and Kwong, the future lieutenant-governor of Alberta, president of the Calgary Stampeders and part-owner of the Calgary Flames, were ticketed to ride on the four-engined, piston-driven DC-4 North Star. They never made it, through a variety of circumstances. For Normie Kwong, it was because he was smitten with a girl, a former cheerleader at King Edward high school in Vancouver, the young woman who is now his wife.

“Everybody’s had situations like that where you’ve made the right choice, or a lucky choice, and your life has turned out differently,” said Kwong, now 83, and retired in Calgary. “It’s been a pretty good life for me. I’ve been fortunate.”

Not so Saskatchewan Roughriders Mel Becket, Mario DeMarco, Ray Syrnyk and Gordon Sturtridge. They and Winnipeg Blue Bomber offensive lineman Calvin Jones, the Outland Trophy winner from Iowa, were among the 62 killed on board

when Flight 810 slammed into Mount Slesse, known as “The Fang”, as it made an attempt to return to Vancouver because of icing conditions before it disappeared over the Cascade Mountains. It still remains Western Canada’s worst aviation disaster.

“The Crash”, directed by Montreal film maker Paul Cowan, approaches the subject from the perspective of Edwin Harrison, a 27-year-old lineman with the Calgary Stampeders who happens to be the grandson of Calvin Jones.

A guard, Jones became the first collegiate football player ever to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated in its inaugural year (1954). A year later, he became the first black player to win the Outland Trophy as the top lineman in U.S. college football.