NEW ORLEANS – The Crescent City’s unique brand of voodoo threatened to sneak up on the Baltimore Ravens, the kind of dark magic that defies logic and explanation. If Las Vegas oddsmakers couldn’t plan for this, how could Baltimore Coach John Harbaugh have prepared for Sunday’s unexpected turn of events?
But nothing was about to darken this day for the Ravens. When it was all over and the mercurial team flickered back to life to win Super Bowl XLVII, players embraced the glowing Vince Lombardi Trophy. Their brilliant leader was able to go out on top, and their understated quarterback showed that the future looked bright, too.
Redskins rookie quarterback Robert Griffin III attended the NFL Honors in New Orleans on the eve of the Super Bowl, and said his injured knee is “feeling good.”
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Baltimore comes out on top, 34-31, after Super Bowl power outage almost steals the game
Relive some of the great plays and key player performances from past Super Bowl games.
Forty-six years ago, Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers beat the Kansas City Chiefs.
A game marred by a power outage that stopped action for more than a half hour, embarrassing the National Football League and forcing the CBS television crew to scramble, ended with linebacker Ray Lewis in tears and his Ravens team on top, 34-31,victors over a San Francisco 49ers squad that was just five yards shy of a historic comeback.
When it was finished, Harbaugh walked through the rain of confetti on the Superdome field to find 49ers Coach Jim Harbaugh and tell his younger brother that he loved him.
“It’s a lot tougher than I thought it was going to be,” the Ravens’ coach said of facing his brother.
The win marked the Ravens’ second Super Bowl title and their first since 2001. It also drew together the franchise’s past and its future. Lewis, the flashy and outspoken face of the franchise for so long, played his last game, not always impressive but impossible to miss.
On the other side of the ball, quarterback Joe Flacco etched his name in the team’s history books while he cemented his place in its future. This might have been Lewis’s team the past several years, but Flacco was named the Super Bowl MVP and he now carries the torch. Even a power outage couldn’t stop him.
Flacco sparkled in the first half Sunday. He threw for 192 yards, three touchdowns and no interceptions. Diehard Ravens fans could already envision the victory parade moving past the Inner Harbor back home. And then it got better.
Jacoby Jones, the Ravens’ speedy offseason addition, opened the second half by fielding the 49ers’ kickoff and returning it 108 yards for a touchdown, giving Baltimore a 28-6 lead and the kind of momentum that should have made the remaining minutes of the game a mere formality.
No team, in fact, had ever blown a lead of that size in the Super Bowl.
But even with two weeks to prepare for the country’s biggest spectacle and the sport’s grandest stage, no one could have foreseen what happened next. One minute the Ravens were celebrating in the end zone. The next, they were left in the dark.
For more than 34 minutes, players milled about, not sure why the power was out or whether it would come back on. Somehow, during the break, the Ravens’ momentum wandered to the other side of the field. League officials weren’t able to immediately explain the outage, but when play resumed, the 49ers were clearly energized.
That 22-point lead disappeared quickly. San Francisco rookie quarterback Colin Kaepernick threw a 31-touchdown to Michael Crabtree. Frank Gore scored from six yards out, and then Kaepernick ran in one of his own. Before long, the Ravens led by only two points, 31-29, and the 49ers were about to score again.
