It’s a great day to be alive, if you want to freeze your ass off out there. The wind chill in DC was below zero as Homer drove Santa’s Little Helper (real name Katie) to the dog park, so that she might frolic in her morning crapulence. There’s a bank on Dupont Circle that has a time and temperature sign, and - when the temps are up in three digits or down in single ones, you usually see some poor kid reporter from a local TV station being forced to do a stand-up under the sign, sweating like a pig or freezing his or her ass off, to reinforce what you already know. It’s too damn hot or too damn cold to be outside.

*

Homer will never forget the afternoon when he watched an hour long satellite feed from South Padre Island, Texas. There was a hurricane coming ashore, and this beautiful (and talented) young lady from a Corpus Christi affiliate was standing out there on the beach, doing affiliate drop-ins for individual stations in weather not fit for man nor beast.

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Starting at five o’clock, she would ask her producer back in the studio who was next. "Baltimore?" she might ask. "Jim and Karen? Okay!"

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Then, she would say hello (off-air) to Jim and Karen at the Baltimore affiliate, and say, "I’m doing fine," wait a few seconds, then begin her stand-up open which didn’t exactly say, "I’m standing here in the wind," but that was the gist of it. Then she went to a pre-recorded package, and then came live to a stand-up close, with the lock-out, "I’m so-and-so reporting live from South Padre Island, now back to you in the studio."

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She’d wait ten seconds, then ask who was next. Detroit? Then Boston? New York? Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

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The wind kept getting worse, and the sand and debris kept blowing in her face. It had to be exhausting, but she stayed out there in a hurricane for a whole hour and put on a helluva show, as we in the Washington bureau watched with a kind of perverse fascination.

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One of these days, one of those kids is going to be maimed - or worse - by a piece of sheet metal or something, while doing a standup in a hurricane.

*

"We want our anchors to be both good at reading the news and also pretending to be in the middle of it," wrote David Carr on Monday, regarding Brian Williams. "That’s why, when the forces of man or Mother Nature whip up chaos, both broadcast and cable news outlets are compelled to ship the whole heaving apparatus to far-flung parts of the globe, with an anchor as the flag bearer. We want our anchors to be everywhere, to be impossibly famous, globe-trotting, hilarious, down-to-earth, and above all, trustworthy. It’s a job description that no one can match."

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Carr, a brilliant but troubled writer and critic, who battled both a crack cocaine addiction and cancer, collapsed and died last night in the New York Times newsroom, and Homer has been giving a lot of thought to his words and to the fate of Brian Williams.

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Homer makes no excuse for any of Williams’ exaggerations or embellishments. But he has been doing a lot of thinking about how some things and elements of an event are "misremembered," a Williams word that has become as notorious as the phrase "wardrobe malfunction."

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You see, Homer first wrote about his personal experiences with the Immaculate Reception here in BTSC, and they have been copied and recopied any number of places. But it now appears Homer misremembered one - and probably two - details in the story.

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The basic elements of the story are that Homer was covering the game for ABC Sports, that he saw the IR from the press box, had a 406pm deadline and took the elevator down to the ground floor immediately after the play, saw Mr Rooney on the elevator, told him what happened on the play, went out onto the field, did a brief interview with Franco Harris while the Raiders argued the legality of the play, and watched the last play of the game from the back of the end zone before heading back up to the press box to feed his tape to the network. Those basic elements are solid and unchanged.

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But Homer absolutely misremembered one detail about of the end of the game.

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On August 7, 2012, he went up to NFL Films to recount his story for the production of "Immaculate Reception, A Football Life."

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"So I watched Roy Gerela’s squib kick, before I ran for the elevator," I told producer Neil Zender, "because that was the last play of the game."

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"No it wasn’t," said Zender.

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"Sure it was," I said.

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"Nope," said Zender. "We have the film of that game, and I’ve watched the end a hundred times. They had the squib kick with five seconds left. The Raiders fell on the ball and there was time for one more play. Stabler threw a Hail Mary pass. It was incomplete."

Oops.

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In my mind’s eye, I immediately either remembered or imagined Stabler throwing a pass downfield to his left to Mike Sinai that fell incomplete. If Zender had said Stabler threw a baseball, I not sure if I would have imagined Stabler throwing a baseball.

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In the barrage of events, and over time, that last play had vanished from my memory. I misremembered.

*

There’s no doubt I misremembered that one detail. But there is another detail that is very much in doubt. And that’s the identity of the other three people in the elevator, Mr. Rooney, Bob Prince, and "Phil."

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I'm sure about Mr. Rooney. That's one of the other three.

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For some time, I have tried to nail down the name of the elevator operator. I thought his name was Phil. I’ve asked Joe Gordon, Art Rooney Jr, Bill Hillgrove, and Bob Smirk, and none of them could recall. I found a photo in my files of someone I thought was the elevator operator, but it turned out to be the press box attendant, Mike Kearns. So I still think Phil was the elevator operator, but have no last name and am not sure.

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But, on August 28, 2014, Ed Kiely died at the age of 96. Mr Kiely was the Steeler publicist for more than four decades. More than that, however, Ed and the Chief were inseparable. Ed Kiely was Art Rooney's sidekick.

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I did not know Mr Kiely, though I may have met him once or twice. I always worked with Joe Gordon.

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The day after Mr Kiely’s death, Ed Bouchette wrote in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that, "(h)e rode the elevator with Mr Rooney down to the locker room just as Mr. Harris was pulling off his miracle play for the Steelers to win their first playoff game."

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Source? Bouchette writes that Ed Kiely told this story to his son Tim.

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Ouch.

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Rewind.

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The person standing next to and just behind Mr Rooney was wearing a very conservative sport coat, maybe a blazer. That, I remember clearly. Bob Prince was famous for wearing stuff that looked as busy as your grandma’s sofa.

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The person standing next to and behind Mr Rooney was speechless. If it was actually Bob Prince, it might have been the first time in his life that he suffered that condition. In fact, when they closed his coffin, they probably had to wait until the Gunner - God bless him - finally shut up.

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I went looking on the web for photos of Ed Kiely and there were a couple that had a very, very strong resemblance to the person I had seen next to Mr Rooney, and also had some resemblance to Bob Prince.

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And it makes complete sense that Ed Keily would have been on that elevator with Mr Rooney.

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I then went back and re-read Ed Bouchette’s touching remembrance of Ed Kiely and noted the irony that both Kiely and the Chief had been in attendance at Forbes Field the day of Mazeroski’s 1960 walk-off home run and the Immaculate Reception, and didn’t see either play. They left Forbes Field, together, when the Yankees led 7-4, to beat the traffic. And they left their box at TRS just before the IR to go downstairs to console their team.

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*

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So there you have it. Homer misremembered at least one, and almost certainly two details. No one is calling me on it, nor can I be fired or suspended from my retirement, but, as Uncle Walter used to say, "that’s the way it is."

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So, you may ask, what is the takeaway of this mea culpa?

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One, we do sometimes misremember.

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Two, Brian Williams is the first human being of any political persuasion to suffer any real consequence for lying about Iraq....and...

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Three, as my young friend Kennedy points out, there is no justice in the world if Williams gets fired while Roger Goodell still keeps his job.

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Keep warm, my friends. It’s not a fit day out for man nor beast.