To understand what the NFL's return means to Baltimore, you

could start at Memorial Stadium. It's a throwback, a luxury-box-

and Jumbotron-free zone that is as fan-friendly as the Colosseum

in Rome. Oh, 46-year-old Memorial Stadium has its antiquated

charms, including bathrooms that overflow on schedule, like Old

Faithful, in the third quarter. (Game-day tip: Drink your beer

early.) For a stadium to be a throwback, though, all you need

are uncomfortable seats, bad sight lines and an absence of

designer coffee. Any place can have that. But turn your stadium

into a time machine, and you have something. In the case of

Memorial you have Diner meeting Back to the Future each

home-game Sunday at precisely 12:40 p.m. That's when the

Baltimore Colts band marches onto the field before a Baltimore

Ravens game. And the fans go slightly nuts. Fellini would have

loved it.

This is as close to surrealism as you're likely to find in a

football stadium. The Colts band, outfitted in familiar blue and

white, hits the field playing that old standard Let's Go You

Baltimore Colts, as if it were 1958 and Johnny Unitas and Alan

Ameche and Big Daddy Lipscomb and Raymond Berry were waiting in

the tunnel. Remarkably, unaccountably, the band never disbanded.

Composed of believers in the one true faith, the Baltimore Colts

marching band has outlasted the Baltimore Colts football team by

12 years. It's music's answer to cryogenics.

"I know it sounds strange," said band member Ken Stastny, 28, as

the horns blared Jailhouse Rock during a recent rehearsal. "Why

did we stay together when, for all intents and purposes, that

friend we called the team had died? It's like we watered the

flowers every day even though we knew the flowers were dead.

But, lo and behold, the resurrection has come, and now we have a

team again. People thought we were the town idiots for so many

years. But now we can say, 'Hey, that was all worthwhile.'"

Football-crazy Baltimore survived 12 wilderness years without an

NFL franchise, 12 years of false hopes and failed expansion

dreams. But when it got a new team, well, that team was

Cleveland's old one. With one week left in the 1996 regular

season, the Ravens are 4-11. Their beat-up defense (nine

starters have missed at least one game because of injuries)

gives up nearly 30 points a game. Early in the season the Ravens

played tough against good teams--the Denver Broncos, the

Indianapolis Colts, the New England Patriots--only to fall short

at the finish. Since the middle of the season they have played

tough, only to blow leads at the end.

But more important than how the Ravens have played on the field

is how they've played in the stands. Yes, the games sell out.

No, it's not the same as the old days when the Colts were in

town. (Note to readers: This may be a recurring theme.) And

that's the problem. Ask anyone.

Ask Jim Phillips, 59, a 26-year member of the Colts Corral, the

old booster club, and now president of the Council of Baltimore

Ravens, the new booster club. It took Phillips seven years on

the waiting list to get into his chapter of the Corral.

"Somebody had to die," he explains. So far he's got about a

thousand Ravens Roosters. Still, the club is not what its

predecessor was. "Of course it's not the same," says Phillips.

"But it will be. You have to give it time."

Ask anyone who parks in the same place near Memorial Stadium

that he did when the Colts were here, who eats his pregame

brunch at the same restaurant, who sits on the same old and now

possibly threadbare Colts cushion. Everyone at a Ravens game

seems to have been an old Colts fan or to imagine that he was.

It's said that the past is a foreign country, but in Baltimore

it's the past that's familiar. The Ravens are unfamiliar.

If you go to a game, you'll see. There appears to be forced

enthusiasm. Ravens wide receiver Michael Jackson said early in

the year he felt he needed to hold up a sign: cheer now. When it

rained (yes, rained, not snowed, as it usually did in Cleveland)

on the day of the big home game against the Pittsburgh Steelers,

there were 12,623 no-shows. That's not exactly hysteria. That's

more like being in touch with your inner Weather Channel. That's

saying, Yeah, I put down my $150 for two tickets, but it's not

worth getting wet for, man. Hysteria meets common sense, and

common sense wins? What kind of football town is that?

But in an important way, football never left Baltimore, despite

that snowy night of March 28, 1984, when the Mayflower trucks

sneaked the team out of town and deposited it in Indianapolis.

The Colts weren't just a team in Baltimore, the way, say, the

Buccaneers are around Tampa Bay. The Colts were a religion,

which may be the oldest and most enduring football cliche, as

old as the single wing and as enduring as the halftime beer run.

If the Colts were not a religion, explain this: A new team has

come to town, but the old church keeps calling.

Forget Memorial Stadium. If you want to find football fans, go

to a bar. That's one thing that will never change. Baltimore has

many bars, but only a few of them have shrines.

In Brooklyn, a working-class neighborhood in south Baltimore,

near the docks and the factories that once made the city a

leading industrial center, there's a tavern called Club 4100,

and outside it is a shrine to Unitas, who used to stop in after

games. His handprint, of the right hand that threw the ball

39,768 yards for the Colts, is cast in a block of cement sitting

outside the joint. Every Easter for the last 28 years Manny

Spanomanolis, 56, and his brother Dino, 52, who run the place,

have had a party for hundreds of neighborhood kids. According to

Manny, Unitas has made it to the party 25 of those years and has

tossed a football with the kids. "He's a great gentleman," Manny

says, without risk of argument.

On this November night at Club 4100, Chuck Thompson, the Hall of

Fame voice of the old Colts, is having a book-signing party for

his memoir, Ain't the Beer Cold! And many of the old faithful

have shown. At the bar, sipping whiskey, is George Kelch. He's

wise in the ways of Baltimore and the Colts. He was a fan from

the beginning, back in 1947, when the first incarnation of the

Colts came to Baltimore as part of the All-American Football

Conference.

Kelch offers you a seat, a drink and his wisdom. Eventually,

inevitably, the conversation turns to the night the Colts stole

out of town. "Do I remember the day they left?" Kelch says. "Do

I remember Pearl Harbor? Do I remember my wedding day? The night

they left was a very sad, strange night. It was devastating,

personally devastating. For me, for thousands of people, it was

something we couldn't put into words. People would just look at

each other, and we knew we were all thinking the same thing: How

could this happen?"

Kelch nursed the wound for 12 years. And when the Ravens came to

Baltimore to be the new home team, he went to see them. He had

to. But the last thing he expected to happen was what happened:

He was let down. "The feeling just wasn't there," he says.

"Maybe I'm too old. But I just didn't feel anything. I looked at

those ugly damn uniforms--they look like Halloween costumes--and

they didn't look like my team. The Colts belonged to Baltimore.

You knew the players. You lived down the street from them. You

ate in the same restaurants. Johnny Unitas would come in here

and have a beer. How's that going to be the same?"

Maybe, Kelch muses, it's not the same because Baltimore stole

the team from Cleveland. "You know what it's like?" he says.

"It's like your wife left you, and then your best friend's wife

left him, and now you're living with her. It just doesn't feel

right."

As Kelch talks, there's sports on the TV over the bar, and

country music is playing in the background. Meanwhile, Madge,

who works behind the bar, and Big John, who drinks on the other

side, are talking Ravens. Madge is a fan, and Big John is not,

although he can tell you exactly how the Ravens blew the game

the previous Sunday.

"When the Colts left, it broke my heart," Madge, a woman in her

50s, says, "but now my children have a team. And their children

will have a team. I go there, and it feels the same--very

exciting. Some Colts fans can't accept this team. But I wanted

it so much. I just never got used to Sundays without a team. If

I had my way, everyone would be a Ravens fan. I know for all my

kids, all my grandchildren, it's going to be an all-Ravens

Christmas. All Ravens gifts."

Big John, a 61-year-old guy in a cowboy hat and boots, is a Club

4100 regular. He grabs you around the shoulder, presses you

close to his bearded face and speaks the truth. "My sports days

are over," he says, not sadly but loudly. "Let the young kids

have this team if they want. But it won't be the same. When the

Colts were here, you'd go to church on Sunday and pray for these

guys. I'd pray that [Green Bay Packers linebacker Ray] Nitschke

didn't get to Unitas. You going to pray for these guys today?

They'll be playing for somebody else before you finish. Look, I

wouldn't trade that time for nothing. I had my time. Let the

young people have theirs. At least they got something."

This is an argument that plays all over the city. The debate

began on the day the Browns (yet to be rechristened the Ravens)

came to Baltimore, stolen from Cleveland as surely as Esau's

birthright was swiped by Jacob. Most of the speakers at the news

conference heralding the Browns' arrival knew it was a somber

day: Although Baltimore was getting football back, Cleveland was

hurting in exactly the same way Baltimore had hurt 12 years

before.

Only Maryland governor Parris Glendening didn't seem to get it.

"It was fun," he shouted amid all the somber faces around him.

He thought the occasion was about politics and not about broken

hearts. He's not from Baltimore, of course, or he would have

known better. There were even whispers that he must be

a--gasp!--Washington Redskins fan, as if that explained his

insensitivity.

In Baltimore they're having to learn to love again. (For much of

the year it has been more like a first date. A little necking,

maybe, nothing more.) Once, the Colts owned the town. They sold

out every game, while the Orioles had empty seats during the

World Series. Now the Orioles draw 3.6 million a year. Turn on

sports talk radio, and if the announcer says, "Let's talk

Ravens," the next 15 calls are on whether the Orioles should

have kept Todd Zeile.

The Ravens are lovable, though, in the way that the 1962 New

York Mets were. They lose consistently, but they lose with

style. They're coached by lovable Ted Marchibroda, who coached

here the last time the Colts were any good. The stadium, though

packed, is not as noisy as when it was called the world's

largest outdoor insane asylum. It's impolitic even to say

"insane asylum" anymore. Times have changed, despite the

Baltimore Colts band.

Season highlights, in case you weren't paying attention.

Sept. 1: Ravens win opener, which might have been the big news

of the day if Baltimore hadn't decided to outlaw tailgating at

stadium parking lots. Riot narrowly averted.

Sept. 15: Ravens quarterback Vinny Testaverde throws three

interceptions. Guarantees he'll never have a day like that

again. Promises to see what he can do about tailgating situation.

Oct. 13: Ravens lose 26-21 at Indianapolis to hated Colts.

Nov. 3: Ravens start a four-game losing streak. Cop in parking

lot says, "I'm supposed to be writing tailgating tickets. Damn,

lost my pen."

Nov. 24: Ravens coaches, five of them, trapped in elevator for

most of third quarter. Maintenance crew spends much of that time

working on wrong elevator. While coaches are trapped, Ravens

outscore Jacksonville Jaguars 6-0. Upon coaches' release, Jags

outscore Ravens 18-3.

Dec. 1: Ravens beat Steelers in rain, breaking seven-game

franchise losing streak to Pittsburgh. Testaverde has sixth

three-touchdown game of season. Headed for Pro Bowl? Vinny? Yep.

Dec. 22: Ravens season ends. Indications are that city will

allow tailgating at new stadium when it opens in 1998. Who says

you can't have a happy ending anymore?

If you're looking for a sense of displacement, check out the

large men with large tattoos, the large men with large bank

accounts, the large men with tiny cellular phones in the Ravens'

locker room. These guys know what Baltimore is going through.

They're going through the same thing. "I may be a Baltimore

Raven," says Michael Jackson, "but I'm a Dawg for life. I guess

right now I'm a Dawg with wings."

Ah, the Dawgs. You can take the man out of the Dawg Pound (the

end-zone section at Cleveland Stadium where the Browns' most

rabid fans congregated), but you can't take the Dawg Pound out

of the man. In Cleveland it was acceptable to do a group strip

in subfreezing temperatures to spell out (sometimes correctly)

the team's name. It was also acceptable to dress up as a dog.

You can see how a player's attachment to this kind of fan would

develop.

Ravens center Steve Everitt, who was the Browns' first-round

draft pick in 1993, still feels the tug. He loves Cleveland. Not

likes Cleveland, loves Cleveland. Anyone can like Cleveland.

It's got the lake and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and it

used to have Albert Belle. Here's what love is: Everitt grew up

in Miami yet decided to make Cleveland his year-round home. The

fans loved him for that and for his long hair and for the tattoo

of a knife down the middle of his back. And so, in honor of

those fans, Everitt wore a Browns bandanna under his helmet

during a Ravens preseason game--for which the ever-vigilant NFL

thought police fined him $5,000. To Everitt's amusement, the

letter from the league said the fine would come out of his

Browns paycheck.

"That was something I planned from Day One," Everitt said in

early November, while sitting out with a torn pectoral muscle.

In Cleveland, Everitt's torn pec would have been front-page

news, complete with medical diagrams and prognosis. In Baltimore

it's just a torn pectoral. "I felt like such a sellout," Everitt

says, his voice rising. "I've got tons of people back in

Cleveland who were hurting. Wearing the bandanna was just my way

of saying I appreciate the people back there. It was nothing

against Baltimore. I don't blame Baltimore for getting a team,

no way. And the Baltimore fans have been great. But it's

football season, and there's nothing going on in Cleveland, and

it kills me, man."

Ravens tackle Tony Jones, who played eight years with the

Browns, says Cleveland fans related especially well to linemen,

and linemen related right back. It was a blue-collar thing. You

wouldn't understand. "Those people knew that every Sunday I

would do whatever it took to give my team, my organization, my

city, a chance to win, and they loved that," he says. "I go out

in Cleveland, and I can't go nowhere without, 'Hey, T-Bone, man,

let me get you a drink.' In Baltimore the people don't know me.

They see me in the mall, and you can see them thinking, That's a

pretty big guy. If they find out I'm Tony Jones and I play for

the Ravens, they say, 'Dude, I hear you're supposed to be pretty

good.'" He laughs, and the big gold T-BONE necklace bounces

against his massive body. "Yeah, pretty good. You can't expect

nothing else. No way it's going to be like Cleveland, not for a

few years."

The Ravens player who probably fits in best is Testaverde, who

never fit in anywhere else before. His former life in Tampa is

best described in medieval terms. In Cleveland it wasn't much

better. "That was Bernie Kosar's town," Testaverde says. "No

matter what I did, short of a Super Bowl win, it was always

going to be Bernie Kosar's town.

"And then I come to Baltimore, which hasn't had a team all these

years, and now it's not even named the Colts. So it's not Johnny

Unitas's team or Bert Jones's team. That's something I hope to

make the best of. I know we haven't made it to the Super Bowl,

but one thing the Baltimore fans can say, we've played exciting

football. They've gotten their money's worth. And the fans have

been absolutely incredible."

Maybe this is the greatest indictment of Baltimore: There's no

quarterback controversy. Testaverde throws an interception at a

crucial moment, and the radio talk shows don't light up. And if

life is peaceful for Vinny, what does that say about the passion

for football here? Or maybe it's just that he is having such a

good year that he's won over the people.

The Ravens are starting to get a better sense of Baltimore--"The

food is great," Tony Jones says, "which is dangerous when you're

an offensive lineman"--and Baltimore is getting a better sense

of the Ravens. "It's growing on me," Jackson says. "That's the

best I can say when people ask me about Baltimore: It's growing

on me."

"People don't know," Art Donovan says, sitting in the kitchen of

the country club he owns in suburban Baltimore. "Believe me,

they have no idea."

Donovan is talking. And what you do when you're with Donovan is

listen. You've probably caught his act on Letterman. What makes

the act work is that it's so genuine. In the mid-1950s, before

the big money hit the game, Donovan nearly gave up the Colts to

be a New York City cop. In those days it wasn't a clear-cut

choice.

"We were Baltimore's college team," says Donovan, who came to

play for the Colts in 1950 and has been around Baltimore ever

since. "The people thought we were their kids. They knitted for

us, hats and scarves and sweaters, whatever you needed or didn't

need. They'd bake cakes for us. Loudy [the late superfan Hurst

Loudenslager] and his wife, Flo, made a cake for you on your

birthday every year. When we returned from a road game, they'd

be at the airport at 4 a.m. with a phonograph and a mile-long

extension cord to play the Colts' fight song. Didn't matter if

we'd won or lost. They'd be there. This is nuts, right? The

band. The fan clubs. I'm telling ya, it was like a college team.

All you had to do was be halfway nice to the people, and they

ate it up."

The Colts were at least halfway nice. In the era before Pete

Rozelle made pro football America's game, the Baltimore players

were out in the neighborhoods selling Colts football. If you

went to church before a game, one of the players might be there

for the Holy Name breakfast. If you went to a bar, it might be

Colts night. If you belonged to the Optimists, some Colt was

going to be at your meeting. The Colts were the community; the

community was the Colts. And by the late 1950s, when they were a

championship team, they sold out every game, which back then was

considered a phenomenon.

"We had this general manager, Don Kellett," Donovan says. "He

was a cozy guy, very cozy. He'd tell us we gotta go here, gotta

go there, gotta meet the people. We'd say, 'Mr. Kellett, why we

gotta go?' He'd say, 'It's your civic duty.'" Donovan laughs.

"Civic duty? Oh, he was something. And they didn't pay us a

penny, not a cent for that. He was cozy all right. People just

don't know."

When Donovan wasn't out in the neighborhood working for the

Colts, he was out in the neighborhood working for a local

distillery. Donovan was probably the first Mr. Baltimore Colt.

Unitas is an icon. But Artie is just Artie. Everybody in town

knew Art Donovan, and Art knew everyone right back.

"There was this guy," Donovan says, "we called him The Fan. What

the hell was his name? We went to his funeral. He took too much

interest in the Colts, and his plumbing business went to pot. I

remember this other man, Mr. Martin, who worked for the B&O

Railroad. He told me he was such a fan that if we lost, he

wasn't right again until Thursday. Couldn't do nothin' all week.

I told him, 'Mr. Martin, when we lose, we go out and get loaded

and forget about it the next day.'

"This is what it was like in Baltimore. It wasn't like anyplace

else. I tell the guys, if we'd played in Chicago or New York or

somewheres, we'd be forgotten. Baltimore is different. People

just don't know."

The Ravens, having been not so long ago the Browns, have some

idea. For the first game the old Colts were brought back to

Memorial Stadium. Johnny U handed off the ball, old to new. The

Ravens front office rounded up about 40 former Colts and put

them in Colts jerseys and then handed them Ravens jackets. Guess

what? The players couldn't rip those jackets off fast enough. "I

didn't want to be there," Donovan says. "What the hell should I

do this for? I'm not a Raven. They conned us into it. They got

their own team. Let them make their own history."

You can locate the future in a giant hole in the ground. By July

the hole will begin to look like a stadium. By September 1998 it

will actually be the Ravens' stadium, a companion piece to the

adjacent cathedral that is Oriole Park at Camden Yards. "It will

be on a par with Oriole Park--a cousin, not a sister," says John

Moag as he lunches in the Stadium Club, on the top floor of the

wonderfully idiosyncratic former B&O warehouse just beyond

rightfield, from where you can almost see the giant hole. "It

will be intense. Baseball is played in a park. This will be a

football stadium."

You probably don't know Moag's name, which might be all right

with him. As head of the Maryland Stadium Authority, Moag

clinched the deal with Browns/Ravens owner Art Modell. Moag, a

lawyer who fits in well with the other lawyer types eating at

the Stadium Club, never anticipated the reaction the move would

get--a nationwide media assault and the excoriation of Modell.

"I think all of us believed that there would be a couple weeks

of outcry and then resignation that that's the way life is,"

Moag says. "I knew it would be more serious than the other

franchise moves because the Browns are a storied franchise and

because they drew 70,000 a game. But I never guessed it would be

what it was."

He did guess, though, that football and Baltimore would be a

good match. He understands the city's contradictory attitudes:

an inferiority complex versus a certainty that there's no better

place to live. There's a New Yorker cartoon showing a guy on a

tropical isle sitting beside a pool framed by palm trees. He's

talking into the phone: "Hey, it's not Baltimore, but then what

is?" A true Baltimorean would enjoy the cartoon but wouldn't get

that it was supposed to be funny.

"The demographics in this city are just perfect for the NFL,"

Moag says. "Football is a blue-collar sport. And, whatever has

changed in Baltimore, it's still a blue-collar town. You look at

the crowd, it's real Baltimore. There's a huge population in

this town that considers a ticket to the Ravens game a

reasonable and legitimate cost of living, right up there with

rent and groceries. I sit around a lot of these people, and I'm

in the $75 seats. They say, 'I won't get a new car. I won't take

a vacation this summer. But I have to have Ravens tickets.'"

Like many Eastern seaboard cities, Baltimore has problems.

Declining population. Declining schools. The main library branch

is closed on Fridays because there's not enough money. But

still, there's $200 million for a football stadium that will be

used 10 times a year. Moag, the lawyer, is ready to defend it:

The stadium is downtown, and it's another part of the Baltimore

renaissance that includes Camden Yards and the Inner Harbor and

the new Convention Center. Tourism is now Baltimore's

second-largest industry. Fourteen thousand people took the tour

of the baseball park in the 1995-96 off-season. Yes, there are

only 10 Ravens dates, but football, Moag points out, is

different from baseball. Football games are weekend-long events.

"You know, people like to spend money," Moag says. "You hear at

the kitchen table people talking about dropping $100 or $150 at

the ballpark, but they do it very willingly. People can't wait

to get out of Memorial Stadium and into the new stadium and

spend money there. And spend money at the Inner Harbor and show

up at Phillips crab house with 30 people before a game."

It's a new day. Moag knows it can't be like the old days. "The

player is a very different kind of person," he says. "He doesn't

stay with a team anymore. The money is huge. It's an entirely

different mood. And there's the other element: He's black.

Blacks are an overwhelming percentage of football players today.

But not on the old Colts--they were white guys who didn't,

quote, threaten other white guys, so to speak. The white,

blue-collar fan could relate to them, and that's changed.

"Everybody is still trying to figure out how the new team fits

into his experience. What surprised me, my wife loves it. She

wants and expects to be at the stadium every week. My daughters

are both into it in a big way. That's new to me. When I grew up,

girls at least feigned having no interest in football. Remember

Diner? In Diner that quiz about Colts trivia was the unfortunate

hurdle the girl had to get over to marry the guy. Now, to have

two little girls who are absolutely gaga over football, who

insist that they have a football to throw around, it kind of

hits you over the head that everything's changed."

Everything has changed, yet people come to Ravens games hoping

nothing has changed, or at least nothing fundamental. It's hard

to put your finger on what exactly was lost when the Colts left

Baltimore 12 years ago, except that surely something was

lost--and not just the opportunity to see outsized men crash

into each other and the chance to drink overpriced beer in bad

weather and in uncomfortable seats.

Maybe people come to Ravens games in search of what politicians

like to call family values. No one knows what "family values"

means, really. One possible definition: Values we never had but

imagine that we had in some better time and can find again if we

can replicate that time.

Maybe that's what brings Bob and Mike Miller, father and son, to

their seats down near the end zone. They're looking for

something, and--this is good news if you like your endings

happy--they think they may have found it. On this November day

the Ravens are fending off the Cincinnati Bengals, but Baltimore

will, of course, lose in the end. That doesn't seem to

discourage father or son. Bob lives in Hagerstown, Md., an hour

from Baltimore, and is mostly retired; he sells a few cars on

the side. Mike lives in Wilmington, Del., where he works for a

pharmaceutical company. He left Hagerstown to join the Navy soon

after the Colts skipped out on Baltimore.

"The Colts left," Mike says, "and then I left, but the hex

continued wherever I'd go. I moved to L.A., and both teams left.

Then I moved to Cleveland, and the Browns moved to Baltimore.

Now I'm in Wilmington, where I guess everyone is safe."

Bob had Colts season tickets beginning in 1970, when Mike was

five. The Ravens' first game this season was the first time

father and son had been together in Memorial Stadium since the

Colts left.

Father: I took Michael for 13 years. We'd stop off at this

restaurant on Greenmount Avenue, have a pizza or a hoagy

together, walk up to the game. It was just a wonderful time for

both of us.

Son: We lived an hour away. We were on the road at seven o'clock

for a one o'clock game. It was a ritual. We'd get up early, have

egg sandwiches on the road, go to Little Italy or to Brooks

Robinson's for lunch. We'd always be the first ones in the place.

Father: When [owner Bob] Irsay took the Colts away, I just

dropped football. I could never be a Redskins fan. Mike was in

California, so he'd go see the Colts in San Diego or at the L.A.

Coliseum. I just dropped the Colts.

Son: When you lose something like that, you understand what you

had. I've been away from home for 12 years. Every time I'd call,

we'd talk about those days.

Father: Every father and son should go to a football game

together. It's what America is all about. I don't know how to

put it into words. It's just a special moment for father and son.

Son: This is so huge. We used to sit right up there [pointing to

the upper deck]. We were here for Unitas's last game. People

were singing [Bob and Mike say it together], "Unitas we stand,

divided we fall." We were here when Unitas and Namath both threw

for about 400 yards in the same game.

Father: Every year my wife and I would drive to Topeka, Kansas,

to visit relatives. One year I decided to drive through

Indianapolis. My wife said, "Where in the hell are you going?" I

said, "I'm just going to swing into the Hoosier Dome"--that's

what they called it then. I went to the attendant there and said

that I had to go down on the field. He said, "Why do you have to

do that?" I said, "Because somewhere in my head, I don't really

believe the Colts are here." He said to go ahead. So I went down

the stairs onto the carpet, and I saw the word COLTS. And I saw

the horseshoe. And then I came out of there like the world was

lifted off of my shoulders. It was over. That was the closure I

needed.

The Ravens are still winning, saving the heartbreak for the end.

Mike says that in the old days he and his father couldn't even

talk at games, the stadium would be so loud. Bob says, "I think

the Baltimore fans are special fans. It will be the same. We

just need time."

As Mike watches the game, he thinks about what it might be like

when he's a father. "My wife and I don't have any kids yet," he

says. "But I can't wait. I'll have my kid on my shoulders at the

game when he's one month old. I want him to have the same thing

I had."

B/W PHOTO: WALTER IOOSS JR. [Johnny Unitas and others in game]

B/W PHOTO: JOHN G. ZIMMERMANThe 1958 fans had plenty to cheer about, but '96 crowds find Memorial Stadium to be Heartbreak Hotel. [Crowd at football game]

COLOR PHOTO: DOUG PENSINGER [See caption above--man dressed as Elvis Presley in crowd]

COLOR PHOTO: DOUG PENSINGER While the Colts' band has never quit marching, the Ravens have all too often been knocked off their feet. [Members of the Baltimore Colts band]

COLOR PHOTO: CHUCK SOLOMON [See caption above--Baltimore Raven player being tackled]

TWO COLOR PHOTOS: PETE SOUZA Kelch is among the Club 4100 regulars who pay homage to the Unitas shrine outside the bar. [George Kelch; John Unitas' handprint in concrete]

COLOR PHOTO: DOUG PENSINGER A Browns fan followed his old team to Baltimore. [Man wearing Cleveland Browns parka and paper bag over his face]

COLOR PHOTO: PETE SOUZA A Unitas icon is the centerpiece in Phillips's den. [Statue of Johnny Unitas]