An Immaculate one passes

 Somewhere Franco's Italian Army is weeping today, and raising glasses of good red to the sky. The Terrible Towels droop at half-staff. And tough guys in 32 jerseys and 58 jerseys and 12 jerseys and 75 jerseys are pounding their Iron City and  saying, man, time is a bitch, and ain't that a bitch.

Because they just looked up -- we all looked up -- and Franco Harris was gone.

He passed yesterday at the not-decrepit age of 72, and those of us of a certain age felt another piece of back-in-the-day go whirling off into the cosmos. The years are inexorable, surprise, surprise. One minute we're watching Franco pluck that ricochet off his shoetops; the next, he's gone and the Steel Curtain is gone and Bradshaw-to-Swann is gone.

History. Archives. Dusty volumes on dusty shelves in a dusty library somewhere.

I was in high school when the Immaculate Reception made Franco Harris famous, and sparked decades of  pushback from Raiders fans that it was a DAMN ILLEGAL PLAY.  And I was in college when the Steelers first went to the Super Bowl in '75 and squeezed the life out of the Minnesota Vikings.

 The final was 16-6, which didn't begin to speak to their domination. Mean Joe Greene and the rest of the Curtain didn't let 'em drink a drop. I think the Vikings rushed for like six yards that day. 

(OK, so it was 17 yards. And the Vikings scratched out just nine first downs. But who's counting?)

Franco, meanwhile, ran for 158 yards and was the game's MVP. The Steelers won the Super Bowl the next year, too, and then three years after that won two more in a row. So, four Super Bowls in six years.

In the days before the Bill Walsh 49ers and Bill Belichick Patriots, no one had ever seen the like of it.

Franco of course was a big part of all that, the go-to back whose durability sprang a good deal from smarts. Non-Steelers fans used to make fun of him for running out of bounds so much, but he was ahead of his time with that strategem. It’s how he lasted 13 years and 2,949 carries, and how many backs have those kinds of numbers today?

Things is, he didn't use himself up when there wasn't a reason to. And now he's gone, 38 years after he hung 'em up -- a lot more years than he might have gotten, you figure, had he taken on every tackler on every down just because he could.

And yet, somehow, 38 years are not enough. They never are.