Two plays.

Maybe three, if you count Kevin Dyson’s lunging, desperate attempt to advance the ball across the goal line at the end of the Super Bowl.

Take away that one, though, and two plays stand out in the 40-year history of the franchise that now goes by the name “Titans.” Two plays that every fan has seen again and again, and that will be replayed even more in highlight reels as long as there is a National Football League.

Along with the players on the field who made them, two Nashvillians will forever be associated with those two historic plays. For one of them, it was a pinnacle, a moment that others among his profession only dream of experiencing. For the other, it was a moment he’d be all too happy if no one recalled.

Mike Keith, the play-by-play announcer for the Titans Radio Network, remembers the drive to Adelphia Coliseum on Jan. 8, 2000—the day the Titans met Buffalo in the first round of the AFC playoffs. It would be the day he called the play known as the Music City Miracle. At the Cracker Barrel on Harding Place near I-65, Keith met Cody Allison, the radio network’s sideline reporter. “He gave me a late Christmas present,” Keith recalls. “It was an NFL rule book. On the way in, we pulled up to a BP market. While Cody was inside, I opened the rule book, and it just happened to fall open to the page on backward passes. So while he was inside I read the rule. I remember the key was that, if it’s close, the rule says the play will stand. [A forward lateral] has to be obvious.” Keith filed the new knowledge in his mind, never imagining that he would need to draw upon it just a few hours later.

With equal clarity, Don Orr remembers January 6, 1980. It was a cold day in Pittsburgh. At game time, when the Houston Oilers met the Steelers for the right to advance to the Super Bowl, the temperature was 22 degrees and falling. There was a staBing wind. Piles of snow, shoveled from the frozen artificial turf, surrounded the field at Three Rivers Stadium.

As one of the league’s best officials, Orr, a Nashville businessman in his other life, had been assigned to work the AFC Championship Game. A year before, the Oilers and Steelers had met in this same game, and Pittsburgh had rolled to victory, 34-5. This time, the Oilers jumped to an early lead and hung tough. Late in the third quarter, with Pittsburgh ahead 17-10, the Oilers drove to the Steelers’ 6-yard line. In Houston, the ensuing first-down pass from Dan Pastorini to Mike Renfro still lives in infamy.

“Hell, yeah!” Orr told the Scene several years ago, when asked if he could reconstruct the play on which the game turned. “It’s vivid in my mind. Houston was driving for a TD. Pastorini threw the ball into the corner of the end zone. At that time I was a side judge with responsibility for the sideline. Renfro caught the ball over his left shoulder going away from me and out of the end zone. But then he turned toward me, and I could see the ball was sliding across his body. So I ruled he didn’t have control.”

The referees huddled immediately to confer on what each had seen. Because of the angle, no other official had a clear view to judge whether Renfro had juggled the ball. There were no sideline instant replay cameras to consult. Orr’s call stood. Instead of scoring a game-tying (and, perhaps, momentum-swinging) touchdown, the Oilers settled for a field goal and a 17-13 deficit. They never got any closer.

Two weeks later, after the Steelers had won the Super Bowl, many observers concurred that the two best teams in the NFL had actually met on that frigid day in Pittsburgh. The Oilers and their fans, meanwhile, were left to wonder what might have been.

Keith’s moment was even more dramatic. The Titans had led Buffalo the whole game. Then, to cap a well executed, last-minute drive, Steve Christie hit a 41-yard field goal that gave the Bills the lead—and an apparent victory.

On the air, remembers Keith, “I said, ‘Do the Titans have a miracle left in them in what has been a magical season?’” Those words proved so prophetic that many people suggested Keith knew what was coming next. Keith smiles and shakes his head. “Not true,” he says.

What was coming, of course, was “Home Run Throwback.” Fullback Lorenzo Neal fielded the short kick and tossed it back to tight end Frank Wycheck, who started to his right, then turned and fired a pass across the field to Kevin Dyson, who followed a convoy of blockers 75 yards down the sideline and into the end zone.

The fresh-faced Keith, who had apprenticed under John Ward in Knoxville (the legendary former voice of the Tennessee Vols) and had never even seen a pro football game in person until he announced his first one for the Titans, suddenly became part of a play that stands now with Franco Harris’ “Immaculate Reception” as the most amazing in the history of the NFL.

“The first thing I thought,” says Keith, “was that Frank threw a forward pass, because I sit 40 yards to the left [of where the play occurred]. “I looked back three or four times for a marker. I called out, ‘There are no flags,’ because that’s what I learned from John Ward. Listeners depend on you to be their eyes and ears, and you don’t want to build them up by calling a touchdown and then have to tell them there’s a penalty.”

Keith immediately recognized the historic nature of the Music City Miracle, but he says he didn’t perceive the link between the play and his broadcast until later. “After the game, I went to Chili’s in Cool Springs with my wife and kids and Cody Allison,” he remembers. “They were playing the highlights on a TV, and they had the sound turned up. All of a sudden I’m hearing the call of the play. Then I got home and the answering machine was full of messages, people wanting to do interviews.”

In the next few days, Keith was heard on radio sports programs from L.A. to New York. Everyone wanted to know about Home Run Throwback. On the morning after the game, however, his first task was to compose a letter to Ward, his old mentor. “I wrote him that, if I did something right the day before, it was in large part because of him. I got a wonderful letter back. He had been listening to the game. I was glad I hadn’t known. To me, that’s like Beethoven hearing you play the piano. In the letter, he said, ‘I was as proud of you over the [impartial] way you called Christie’s made field goal as of anything. That’s what I taught you.’ ”

Even before he got home from Pittsburgh, Don Orr knew he’d been part of something historic. He knew from the histrionics. “My wife got calls even before the game was over,” he told the Scene in 1995. “I have no idea how they found us. We got calls from radio announcers, psychos, drunks. I got so many letters—some were just addressed to ‘Don Orr, Officiating Houston-Pittsburgh Game, Nashville, Tenn.’ ”

In Houston, where 60,000 fans gathered at the Astrodome after the game, Orr’s likeness was hanged in effigy. The Oilers’ colorful coach, Bum Phillips, suggested that Orr and the officiating crew deserved a good “switching.” One Houston minister filed a $12 million lawsuit, claiming that he suffered sleeplessness and anxiety because of Orr’s call. “It was a very trying time,” the ref recalled.

Eventually, the suit was dismissed. Orr went on to officiate for 17 more seasons. He retired in 1996 as one of the league’s most respected referees. His call in Pittsburgh generated demands for instant replay in the NFL. Ironically, though, had the replay rule been in force that year, there’s a strong possibility that Orr’s call would have stood. Though Renfro always maintained he had possession of the ball, and though Oilers fans maintained the TV replays proved him right, refs today might well regard the video as inconclusive.

Orr would be delighted if he never heard about the call again. “It’d suit me,” he said last month. “I’d like to drop it.”

But he can never quite escape it. Some die-hard fans remember, especially whenever the Titans play Pittsburgh. Every so often, someone writes an article about him. As the Oilers were preparing to move to Tennessee, a sportswriter informed owner Bud Adams that Orr lived in Nashville. Adams’ eyes grew to the size of silver dollars at the news. “Is that right?” he said with a dry smile. “I might have to send him some white roses or somethin’ when we get to town.”

So far, says Orr, Adams hasn’t made good on that statement. But if he ever decides to look up the retired referee, he’s easy to find. Every Sunday the team is at home, Orr is in his seat at the Delph. He’s been a Titans PSL holder since the stadium opened.

While Orr still aspires to the anonymity that refs are taught to regard as a virtue, Keith achieved an unexpected, unintended immortality. Just as “The Giants win the pennant!” has become inseparable from BoBy Thomson’s famous 1951 home run, and Johnny Most’s croaky exclamation, “Havlicek stole the ball!” is part of our collective memory of the Boston Celtics’ famous playoff win over Philadelphia, Keith’s call—”He might have something...he’s got something!”—will forever be associated with the Music City Miracle. It’s part of the play.

To Keith, who four years ago was announcing high school football games in East Tennessee, that’s a humbling thought. “I know there’s a guy who’ll call a high school game in Iowa this week who’s a lot better than I’ll ever be, and who’ll never get that chance. I just hope I represented those guys well.”