That morning, I was still asleep as my wife got ready for work, until she shook me awake, turned on the TV and said, "you need to see this."
On the screen beyond the foot of the bed, the World Trade Center towers burned.
"I'm not sure we should be bringing a kid into this world," said my wife, four months pregnant at the time.
A couple of hours later, I was on my way over to what is now the Dignity Health Training Center, where my job as East Valley Tribune beat writer took me every day to cover the Cardinals. Twenty-five years ago today, I needed to do my job as it was. I also needed to be around others while it seemed the world was crumbling.
I found my way into the media relations area, where a TV played. The horrific images played out on the screen, the towers having by then crumbled. I sat in the oversized orange chairs still there from when the team moved into the building more than a decade previous, watching the TV.
Pat Tillman came in the room and sat next to me.
It was a Tuesday, the NFL having just opened their regular season two days prior. With 31 teams at the time, the NFL needed someone to have a Week 1 bye. It had been the Cardinals. They were supposed to fly to Washington D.C. in just a few days for their opener, but now the Pentagon was in flames just a train stop from the hotel where the team was planning on staying.
A day or two later, players from the Giants and Jets, watching the parking lot of their stadium used both for emergency staging from the tragedy and as a reminder of the fallen – commuters who had parked there that day died in the attack, never to return to their cars – told the NFL they wouldn’t be playing games that weekend.
The NFL rightfully canceled those games, perhaps a moot point given that air travel had been stopped out of fear of further hijackings.
In the moment, though, I didn't know games would be canceled, and neither did Tillman. So I did my duty as a reporter, asking Tillman if I could get a comment about the tragedy knowing that the Washington game was looming.
"I wouldn't be worried about our safety," Tillman said as he watched the screen. "My concern would be if it is appropriate. The importance of football ranks zero compared to what happened."
The Cardinals since then have played on 9/11 four times, including the 10th anniversary of the event against the Carolina Panthers at State Farm Stadium. The organization itself has multiplied in employees; the football team remains in the same building as then but the business side moved down the street, populated with more than a few people who had yet to be born on Sept. 11, 2001.
For those that lived through it, the day seems so long ago but also like yesterday. The moment was a driving force in Tillman's decision later to join the military; his story also became unforgettable not only in Cardinals but NFL and nationwide lore.
The Cardinals ended up rescheduling their trip to Washington for the end of the season. The first road trip afterward was a visit to Philadelphia; back East, it was jarring to step off the plane and into an airport filled with soldiers with machine guns.
A road trip to New York later in the season featured a midnight visit (along with my cohorts Kent Somers, Pedro Gomez and Scott Bordow) near Ground Zero, a sobering reminder of the tragedy. Workers were still active around the clock cleaning the area around the remaining skeletons of the towers.
Football was the prism through which many of us absorbed it all.
Never forget.
