Pat Summerall didn't realize it was "The Greatest Game Ever Played" when he was in the middle of it.

His '58 Giants lost to Johnny Unitas and the '58 Colts 23-17 on an Alan "The Horse" Ameche touchdown plunge, in overtime, in the Yankee Stadium twilight . . . a Rockwellian image for the ages.

"I don't think any of us who participated in that game could ever imagine it being called that," Summerall said before boarding a flight at Newark International Airport last week. "I know I didn't."

Well, Dec. 28, 1958, ended with NFL commissioner Bert Bell in tears.

"Maybe, he realized the impact," Colts' Hall of Famer Raymond Berry recently told Summerall. "If so, he was the only one."

On Saturday, ESPN will premiere a two-hour anniversary special which dissects the '58 title game, using 80 percent game action, original audio, original footage, some of it never-before-seen, now fully colorized and in HD.

Slick video overlays of interviews with players then-and-now give the film an Emmy-worthy feel. It will air immediately after ESPN's "live" presentation of the 2008 Heisman Trophy a week from Saturday night.

One "lost" reel used in production was found amid a pile of film canisters in a corner of late Colts/Jets coach Weeb Ewbank's house. Even NFL Films didn't have a copy of it.

NBC pioneered coast-to-coast television coverage of the game, at a time when major league baseball, college football, horse racing and boxing competed for the national stage. Not the NFL.

Pro football got its first pair of big-boy pants that day.

Summerall recalls hearing "The Greatest Game Ever Played" for the first time about a week later, but the words rang hollow.

"We still lost," said Summerall, "and I was still dejected."

ESPN's Chris Berman, host of the two-hour special compares the '58 Colts-Giants players (including 17 Hall of Famers) to the original Mercury astronauts of a few years later.

"(Except) the Mercury astronauts knew they were doing something a little different," Berman said.

"You've got to remember, NFL drafts were done out of a phone book (in the late '50s)," Berman added. "But this one game allowed, all of a sudden, pro football to explode."