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USA Today Sports Media Group
USA Today Sports Media Group
Sport
Robert Zeglinski

The NFL made sure Walter Payton finally got his Super Bowl touchdown

The 1985 Bears are arguably the best team in pro football history. A 15-1 regular-season record. A team rife with Hall of Famers like Mike Singletary, Dan Hampton, and Walter Payton. A blowout in Super Bowl XX. They did it all.

But one black mark has followed the memory of perhaps the NFL’s most legendary team: Payton never got to score a touchdown in the title game.

It was lost in the shuffle of a 46-10 blowout, but indeed, the Bears’ best running back/player/human ever did not cross the goal line with the ball in his hands on that fateful January 1986 day in the Superdome.

Finally, the NFL made up for a particular coach’s past mistakes during Super Bowl LVI.

Payton and another Peyton took center stage in a commercial spot featuring some of the game’s greatest players under the control of some adorable little kids. With the legends deadlocked, it’s Payton who takes a pitch from an almost-sacked Peyton Manning and hurdles over a mass of bodies to score the game-winning touchdown.

”Maybe (coach) Mike Ditka got caught up in the game and didn’t notice it,” Payton told the Chicago Tribune’s Bob Verdi in 1986, a few weeks after the game. ”It’s a little hardening for me.”

Ditka would go on to call it his “greatest regret“, though not until after Payton died in 1999. Sunday helped right that wrong.

A small gesture of a commercial meant to commemorate football’s past, sure, but it wasn’t lost on the most important audience:

Walter Payton’s son, Jarrett, a sportscaster with WGN-TV in Chicago.

Is someone cutting onions? Oh goodness, I need a tissue.

Payton’s commercial touchdown won’t make up for his no-score in an actual Super Bowl, but it does a heck of a lot to make up for old wounds. After almost 40 years, the Paytons, and Bears fans everywhere, can heal.

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