This story by Richard Hoffer originally appeared in the Sept. 24, 2001, issue of Sports Illustrated.
The crawl on the bottom of our screens, reserved in better days for pitching matchups, leaderboards and starting times, now announced building failures, death tolls, the discovery of flight recorders. It was disorienting to see this shorthand of catastrophe so suddenly replace the familiar ticker of our SportsCentered lives. Where BONDS 3 HR once provided the comfortable minutiae, there was now a creeping ribbon of deepening disaster: MAYOR REQUESTS 6,000 BODY BAGS.
