Every sport has that at least one “you had to be there” stand out moment. It never fails. Football has had their share of those wild moments, but the earliest of those moments had to have taken place in the end of 1958. But I’m getting ahead of myself a bit. Let’s dive into the history of the team in the center of this epic moment: the Baltimore Colts.

The 1950s were a hell of a decade for sport in Baltimore, Maryland. It was in 1953 that Baltimore received pro football for the first time with the Colts, and that came one year before the St. Louis Browns moved to Baltimore and became the Orioles. Despite the team’s location (Baltimore is damn near adjacent to DC), the Colts were placed in the NFL’s Western Conference with the Green Bay Packers, the Detroit Lions, the Chicago Bears, the San Francisco 49ers, and the Los Angeles Rams. It didn’t take long for the Colts to improve; their first winning season came in 1957, going 7-5 and finishing third in the West.

Regarding 1958, both conference races were close. The Colts exploded, starting 6-0 before suffering their first loss as they dealt with their QB, Johnny Unitas, being sidelined. Baltimore bounced back when Unitas returned, and their tenth game of the season saw the Colts defeat the Niners, 35-27, in comeback fashion, to clinch the Western Conference Championship with two games left. Baltimore dropped their final two games, resulting in the standings looking closer than they were–the Colts finished one game ahead of the Rams and Bears.

In only their sixth season, the Colts were playing for the NFL Championship for the very first time, but they had to wait a bit for their opponent. In the Eastern Conference, the 12-game regular season ended with the New York Giants and the Cleveland Browns tied atop the standings at 9-3, resulting in a playoff for the East crown. An ugly game that saw both teams turn over the ball four times each ended with the Giants winning at home (Yankee Stadium), 10-0.

The Bronx’s Yankee Stadium also played host to the NFL Championship Game between the Colts and Giants, and it was the Giants who struck first with a field goal by a very familiar name: Pat Summerall. New York led 3-0 after one, but the second quarter was all Colts, scoring two touchdowns off Giants fumbles. Overall, each team had three turnovers in the first half, but at halftime, the Colts led 14-3. The Giants chipped at the lead in the third quarter, cutting it down to 14-10 in the frame and actually taking the lead back in the fourth quarter with a touchdown from another very familiar name: Frank Gifford. Very epic that two players in this game went on to be part of the two greatest announce teams in NFL history. The lead remained entering the two-minute warning, but Unitas managed to lead his famous two-minute drill from his own 14-yard line to the Giants 13-yard line, and with seven seconds left in regulation, Steve Myhra nailed a 20-yard chip shot to tie the game at 17.

So after sixty minutes, the game was tied at 17, meaning that for the first time ever, we had overtime. Overtime was not a thing back then. Any and all regular season games at that time only had four quarters. Even if those games ended tied after sixty minutes, that was it. Only the postseason games had OT, but at that time, it was only the Championship Game, and the rare tiebreaker games. So the 26th official NFL Championship Game (the first official game was played in 1933) needed overtime, and back then, overtime was sudden death–first score of any kind wins. The Giants received the opening kickoff, but ended up going three and out and punting to the Colts. Baltimore started at their own 20, and it ended with Unitas leading a 13-play drive that was capped off by a one-yard touchdown run on third down by Alan Ameche–his second touchdown of the game.

The Baltimore Colts defeated the New York Giants, 23-17, in overtime, on Sunday, December 28, 1958–capturing their first-ever NFL Championship in their short franchise history. This was only their sixth year in play, yet the Colts were champions of football already. Without question, the man simply known and forever remembered as “Johnny U” was the MVP of the game, leading two clutch drives–the two-minute drill that led to the game-tying FG, and the 80-yard scoring drive in OT. Alan Ameche had two scores in the game, one of them being the one-yard score that clinched the championship for Baltimore.

This game, the 1958 NFL Championship Game, is forever known as “The Greatest Game Ever Played” for so many reasons. For one, it was the first NFL Championship Game to go to OT, and the only one from the pre-Super Bowl era to need extra time. We would not see overtime in the big game for another 58 years, when Super Bowl LI between the New England Patriots and the Atlanta Falcons went to OT–the first Super Bowl to do so. Seven years after that game, Super Bowl LVIII between the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers went to OT, and came very close to double OT. Secondly, the drives by Unitas, especially that two-minute drill, the first of its kind. And thanks to the game airing nationally on NBC that day, the NFL’s popularity skyrocketed, and even now, close to seven decades later, it’s still becoming more and more popular. It reminds me of a line I heard in the film, Concussion:

“You’re going up against an institution that literally owns a day of the week. The same day the church used to own. Now it’s theirs.”

As for the Colts, they would go on to repeat as NFL Champions in 1959, again defeating the Giants. This time, no overtime was needed in what would be the end of the final year of pro football before the introduction of the AFL in 1960. The next (and final) time that the Colts won the NFL Championship was in 1968, which was done to advance to what would be known as Super Bowl III. Baltimore famously lost Super Bowl III, but two years later, the Colts won Super Bowl V–the first big game after the merger.

It was after the 1983 season that the Colts moved from Baltimore to Indianapolis, and for most of the years that the team’s played in Indy, they were under the ownership of this man: Jim Irsay. Jim took over ownership after the previous owner, Jim’s father Robert Irsay, passed away in 1997. It was a year after Jim took over that the team drafted this guy named Peyton Manning, who went from a shaky rookie season to definitely being on the Colts’ Mount Rushmore along with Unitas, Marvin Harrison, and probably Reggie Wayne. The Colts would reach two Super Bowls with Manning and under Jim Irsay’s ownership, winning Super Bowl XLI–their first championship since relocating, and their first in 36 years. On May 12, 2025, Jim Irsay passed away at the age of 65, and he did leave quite the lasting legacy on that Colts franchise.

And to think, for the Colts, it all started in Baltimore and with that amazing run to their first NFL Championship in 1958. That game changed the NFL forever, and while both the Colts and Giants had great roads to get to that game, it was the Colts who stood strong in a very tight contest that resulted in the team standing on top of the entire league for the very first time.