I didn’t move from the Baltimore Sun to the Rocky Mountain News in 1997 to cover the Broncos and their first two Super Bowl victories.
It just turned out that way.
I could try to take (fake) credit for bringing a new journalistic vibe to town, but it wasn’t me doing the helicopter dive. That would have been quarterback-cum-restaurateur John Elway on what might have been the greatest day in Denver history.
Before I got to town, in my earlier sports-column-writing days, I had covered all the Elway-led Super Bowl losses, and promptly ridiculed several of them. After the 49ers’ 55-10 trashing of the Broncos in Super Bowl XXIV, I wrote — for the Baltimore Sun — “If this had been a football game, they would have stopped it.”
But I left sports columnizing to become a news columnist in Baltimore not long after the Broncos’ fourth Super Bowl loss, against no wins. It was just coincidental. I had reached the ripe old age of 40, and I figured it was time to grow up and write about the real world, which I did.
And yet, in 1997, apparently not having grown up enough, I left the Baltimore Sun after a long-running feud with the Sun’s editor. (Excuse me if you’ve heard this story before, but I’ve lived only one life so far.)
I picked 10 cities in which I’d want to live and write. I sent off résumés to the cities’ newspapers saying I would love to be either a sports columnist or a news columnist, although I really wanted to remain a news columnist.
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SUBSCRIBESo, I came to Denver. The Rocky and the Post both offered me sports column jobs. It was my first taste of the last great newspaper war, and I picked the Rocky mostly because they asked first.
Less than three years later, I would move to a news column at the Rocky — for which I thank John Temple, then the Rocky editor, every day — and figured my career was set. Ah, such days of innocence.
I’m thinking of this because 28 years later, the Broncos are in line, with a win on Sunday, to be the No. 1 seed in the AFC, which they haven’t accomplished since 2015, and could, with luck, finally get back to the Super Bowl.
And because 28 years later, I’m working for The Colorado Sun, my fourth newspaper/news site since landing in Denver — two of the papers folded, one is on its last legs — and while the Broncos are suddenly on the rise, The Sun also rises. We started seven years ago with 10 reporters and editors — all refugees from the Alden-riddled Denver Post — and we now have nearly two dozen journalists on staff.
That’s not because of any particular vibe I’ve brought to The Sun — although I hope the column has helped — but because you, the readers, have not only accepted The Sun, but have embraced it and have contributed to it, both financially and with as much encouragement as a nonprofit news site could hope for.
And as it happens — yep, all these coincidences — it’s the time of year when we’re running hard up against the 2025 deadline for you to either become a Sun member — here’s how — or simply to make a last-minute, tax-deductible contribution.
We have grown with your help. We can’t continue growing without your help, and without the help of more members, many more, to come. That’s the way the game works these days.
You’ve probably seen a lot of Sun writers over the past few months making a similar ask. Here’s the one I made back in November. One of the first rules of journalism used to be that reporters don’t do asks or, in fact, have the slightest interest in the business side of journalism.
But times have changed — and in newspapers, mostly for the worse — so we ask because we must. I especially like Jennifer Brown’s illuminating piece on the First Amendment when she and a group of reporters defied a Trump administration order not to allow journalists into immigrant activist Jeanette Vizguerra-Ramirez’s detention hearing.
They got in. And Vizguerra would be released on bail. And so a happy ending, to date. But, as we know, not all the endings are quite so good.
Take this as an example: For some reason — I’m pretty sure it has to do with money — the Broncos’ owners plan to desert the soon-to-be-trashed Empower Field at Mile High Stadium, still a beautiful place to watch a football game, for an Even Newer Mile High Stadium. The plan is for the Broncos’ billionaire owners to pay for the stadium, which would have a retractable roof — please let all the regular-season games be played with only the sky above — so maybe even the Super Bowl, that holy of holies, might someday come to Denver.
I won’t ask how many billions you need to attract a Super Bowl, or whether the price seems just slightly decadent. But all the cool kids in the NFL know that the real money these days comes not from ticket sales but from the entertainment districts that are developed around a new stadium, like the one coming to Burnham Yard.
I covered opening night of what was then called Invesco Field at Mile High. The date was Sept. 10, 2001. I wrote about the beauty of the new stadium — a splash of stadium art, all glass and brick and exposed steel — while noting that the old Mile High, then in ruin, had the real South Stands and all the memories and so much of our lives wrapped inside.
Nostalgia meets the future, and, as it so often does, nostalgia loses.
I wrote about those gathering outside the new Mile High with cell phones flashing, amazed at what they were seeing, their jaws scraping, as I wrote, against the newly poured cement. I noted that Denver was then a town of unembarrassed enthusiasms.
You noted the date. You know the horror of the story to come. By the time people woke up to read about opening night, the World Trade Center had been attacked. I’m guessing that my stadium column that ran on 9/11 in the Rocky may have been the least read — and least remembered — I’ve ever written.
Who knows what Denver or the world will be like when the stadium is set to open in 2031?
I mean, who could have possibly guessed what the world would look like as 2025 comes to its miserable end?
I’d like to think/hope that in six years or so, the world might begin to be in a better place, that The Sun, with your continued help, will be thriving, that the Broncos will be at least halfway decent and that when I write my opening-day column from the newest version of Mile High, the world will be recovered from tragedy, and not suffering a new one.
As 2026 is upon us, hoping is the best I can manage. I’m not sure I believe in the Broncos, not with all their flukey wins. And we’re a long way from 2031.
But if you remember that Elway-helicopter Super Bowl from 1998, you also remember the Broncos were underdogs and that the feeling of most fans — hoping against hope — was the dread of yet another humiliation.
What I can say for 2026 is that we are in desperate need of hope — and rooting for the Broncos, if you’re like me and watching from the living room couch, that’s still pretty much cost-free.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
The Colorado Sun is a nonpartisan news organization, and the opinions of columnists and editorial writers do not reflect the opinions of the newsroom. Read our ethics policy for more on The Sun’s opinion policy. Learn how to submit a column. Reach the opinion editor at [email protected].
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