17 stories from 'Undefeated: Inside the 1972 Miami Dolphins’ Perfect Season’

Writer Mike Freeman explores the undefeated season of the Florida team in his book.

13. Long game's journey into night

Football player Garo Yepremian Alan Diaz/AP

Although the Dolphins came up short of winning a championship in 1971, one of the building blocks for the perfect season that was to follow occurred at the end of the ’71 campaign. That is when, in a Christmas Day divisional playoff showdown with the Kansas City Chiefs, Miami won the longest NFL game ever played. Playing on the road, the Dolphins prevailed 27-24 when Garo Yepremian kicked a game-winning field goal in the second overtime.  That occurred 82 minutes, 40 seconds after the opening kickoff.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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