For Some Longtime Residents, Seeing The Shoe on Another Foot Is Still Difficult to Grasp

BALTIMORE -- A framed program and tickets from the Baltimore Ravens' first NFL game in 1996 hang inside Nacho Mama's a few feet from the sliver of a goalpost plundered from Yankee Stadium in 1958 when the Baltimore Colts defeated the New York Giants for their first NFL title. Outside the tiny Mexican restaurant, above the Elvis Presley statue splashed in Ravens purple, a sprawling sign reads:

"Hey Indianapolis! Johnny Unitas is a Baltimore Colt!"

Nearly 23 years after they sneaked out of town for Indianapolis, the Colts return to Baltimore today to face their replacements, the Ravens, in an AFC semifinal game. Although the teams have played six times since the Colts' departure, none of those games mattered as much as this one -- and none has given Baltimoreans as big a platform to vent the hurt and anger many still harbor toward the franchise they once called their own.

"I can't wait to beat the Colts in our house," said Patrick "Scunny" McCusker, owner of Nacho Mama's, which in the Colts' heyday was in the middle of a solidly working class Canton neighborhood. Today, it has trended decidedly upscale. "Then I think finally the knot in my stomach will go away, because anytime I hear about the Indianapolis Colts I still can't stand it."

It's hard to overstate the sting this city felt on March 28, 1984, when a fleet of Mayflower moving trucks drove out of town in the middle of the night packed with Colts helmets, pads, uniforms and memories of 31 years.

"When the Colts picked up and moved, that was the start of the era of football being a business and not a game that an entire city can rally around and be passionate about," McCusker said. "We love the Ravens and we're very passionate about them, but it was a little bit different back then. The players lived in the area. You would see them in the offseason and they were approachable. They were just like us."

Movie producer Barry Levinson, whose breakthrough 1982 film "Diner" was at least tangentially a love letter to the Colts of his youth, says the Colts-Ravens game is a referendum on civic pride -- though he shares the faint disorientation many still feel when they see the team with the distinctive horseshoe helmets and blue and white jerseys run onto the field.

"It's like we're playing against ourselves, or ourselves from the past," said Levinson, who began going to Colts games in 1953, when the city was awarded an NFL franchise. Levinson was in California this week in pre-production on his latest movie starring Robert DeNiro and Sean Penn though was trying desperately to get back for the game.

"It's very strange, and has always been strange, that we went from rooting for the blue and white and the horseshoe to vehemently rooting against it," he said in a telephone interview. "I have to admit that this is not rational behavior on my part, and my friends from out of town say I'm nuts, but I root against the Indianapolis Colts. I never want to see them win, ever. At the draft, I hope they make bad picks."

Once the Colts meant everything to this city. They were the NFL's model franchise, enjoying their first winning season in 1957, then going 15 years without a losing record. They captured the league championship in 1958 and 1959; the '58 game against the Giants at Yankee Stadium, won in overtime on a touchdown run by fullback Alan Ameche, was dubbed the "Greatest Game Ever Played" and provided a huge boost to the league as it entered the TV era. The Colts lost Super Bowl III in January 1969 to Joe Namath and the New York Jets, but beat the Dallas Cowboys to win Super Bowl V in 1971. The roster was stocked with Hall of Famers -- Unitas, Art Donovan, Lenny Moore and Gino Marchetti, each of whom became pillars in the community.

Most players needed a second job in the offseason back then, well before the NFL became a multibillion dollar industry, and they made Baltimore their home. It was a time when the foreman on the night shift at the Bethlehem Steel Plant and the hefty fellow at the end of the corner bar just might have been a Colt.

"I got to know Lenny Moore and met him for the first time when I was 10 years old," said Calvin Hill, 60, an East Baltimore native who attended Yale and starred as a running back for Dallas, Washington and Cleveland. "He encouraged me to go to college. Up until then my father had told me how important it was to go to college, but now Lenny Moore was saying the same thing and suddenly it was etched into my psyche. The Colts were just such an important part of the ethos of Baltimore."