They almost forgot how it feels to win
Gary Shelton, The St.Petersburg Times, published 4 October 1993

Give them credit. When it came down to it, the Tampa Bay Bucs remembered how they were supposed to act. The clock died, and you would have thought they had won a playoff. The players rushed from the sideline, fists clenched in the air, helmets held aloft like trophies in the sun. No eyes cast downward this week. No slumped shoulders. No minds searching for familiar excuses. This was hugs and high-fives and winking back at the fans.

So this is what winning is like. For the longest time Sunday, the Bucs milled around the field, soaking in the afterglow. Usually, in the first moments after a football game, they are scurrying toward the locker room, tunneling to escape. This time, they moved slowly, waving to those who leaned over the railing and knocked the rust off their congratulations.

On the sideline, Broderick Thomas was a scream machine. He was looking up at the fans, pointing to them and then to himself. He was jumping up, waving his arms, wallowing in a day that allowed him to feel personal and collective redemption. How long it will linger, no one knows. But for the moment, it was here. "There is no word," he said later, "to describe how good it felt."

Oh, the Bucs tried. They used the one about the man dying of thirst in the desert. They used the one about the starving man getting a meal. Both descriptions felt a little forced, but when a team wins as rarely as this one does, you have to grant them a bit of hyperbole. Tampa Bay last won in December, back when Republicans ruled the White House, and the way the Bucs were playing coming in, it appeared George Bush might be back before it happened again.

Thus when they rose up and slapped the Detroit Lions 27-10, the image of this team celebrating was unusual indeed. It was even money for a while whether the team would remember to award a game ball to team owner Hugh Culverhouse. (It did.) "You forget what winning feels like," center Tony Mayberry said. "I mean, you remember that it feels good. You just don't remember how good. You forget all the little things about it, how it forgives everything. You lose, and you have all those small, little doubts. You win, and it takes over everything. You want to feel like this again and again and again."

Said safety Marty Carter: "I think this team had lost its taste for winning. We had to get that taste back in our mouths. After today, I think there are more wins in this team."

Okay, okay. The reality police feel compelled to inform you that this is a 1-3 team that beat a Detroit team that seems to be using volunteers from the studio audience at quarterback. Watch the Lions play for a little while, and you become convinced that Wayne Fontes doesn't have Barry Sanders on his fantasy team. So it should be noted that all the Bucs won was one game, and 1-3 comes with a limit on yippees. But when you are Tampa Bay, you take giddiness where you can find it.

For the Bucs, this was as good as it gets. This was Reggie Cobb running the way he did last season. This was a young quarterback, Craig Erickson, showing he's worth buying stock in. Most importantly, however, it was a defense dusting itself off and showing up big. For the game's first series, the Bucs defense looked like nothing quite so much as avalanche victims. Sanders touched the ball three times, gaining 50 yards before he ran out of field and reached the end zone. The Bucs' heads kept snapping sideways as Sanders whipped past, and he looked on his way to about 300 yards. "It was ugly," defensive coach Floyd Peters said. Bears ugly. Giants ugly. Chiefs ugly.

After that, however, the Lions scored only on a field goal after a turnover. The defense, which was supposed to carry this team all along, showed a marked increase in both aptitude and attitude. "I think the mental part has to come before the physical part," linebacker Hardy Nickerson said. "We weren't going to let the game get away from us. I know the crowd was going, `Oooh.' But we said that we weren't going to let it happen again. There was the same kind of look in everyone's eyes."

For the Bucs, the look was different from usual. This time, the other team walked off the field in frustration, looking at its future through fog and controversy. The Bucs? They walked off wearing this odd, little facial contortion, rarely seen in these parts. The corners of their mouths were twisted upward, their teeth were bared. It's called smiling, and it looked good on them. You know, they should try it more often.