The Giants and Packers will play on Sunday evening in Green Bay in the NFC Championship Game, and the temperature is expected to be 6 degrees at kickoff. It will probably be around zero or slightly below zero by the end of the game.
Surely, every player involved in this game will have a story to tell about how he dealt with the cold. The fans, too. 
For the overwhelming majority of folks, it will probably the coldest they've ever been.
If anyone wants to share their own coldest ever story, go ahead. If not, then wait until the picks contest later in the week to start yapping.
My personal coldest ever was when I was 7 years old playing ice hockey at the Low-Tor Ice Center in Haverstraw, NY. It was a Saturday morning, and I was playing in the White Plains Pee Wee Hockey Program against a team from Rockland. I'm guessing the temperature was 6 degrees, same as it will be Saturday in Green Bay.
I remember not being able to feel my feet when I skated. My hands were gone, too. I probably cried a time or two. I don't know if we won or lost. I do know that I did not care. All I cared about was getting to the warming room and eating hot chocolate and sticking my feet as close to the fire without burning them off.
I am actually looking forward to how cold I will feel this weekend in Green Bay. The coldest I've ever been as an adult was in Chicago for the 1985 divisional playoffs between the Giants and the Bears. I clearly remember my nostrils freezing every time I breathed in as I walked into Soldier Field.
The Giants lost that day, 21-0. Sean Landeta whiffed on a punt, because the ball blew away from his foot from the time he let it go from his hands to kick it.
It was the last game of my first season covering football.
The Giants won the Super Bowl the next year.
If I'm not mistaken, Landeta still lives on Long Island. He punted longer than any human being I know. He is a very nice person, and I always enjoy running into him.
Comments (13)
One winter up here in Albany, it was below zero for about a week. The drive up ATMs all froze. We actually had to get out of the car and go into a bank to get cash.
I was in Burlington, VT once and when I came out of the hotel it was -17. My car's seat felt like steel plate. Hard and cold (not the way I like it, BTW.)
bg.you found my car THANKS.
The coldest I ever have been was walking from the Sheraton to the Carrier Dome for a Syracuse-St. John's game, which is uphill but only a quarter mile or so. I was walking with Dave Cummings, then of the Daily News, now of ESPN The Magazine. I have lived in Ithaca, NY, and Anchorage, AK, but I never, ever have been through anything like that. It was minus-43 with the wind chill. I truly believed if we had taken a wrong turn or found the door to the dome locked, we would have died on the spot. This was in the early 1990s sometime. We ended up going in through a fan entrance because the media entrance was around back, and we would have been dead by the time we got there.
nb,some of your columns/blogs have been PRETTY cold.(just on ocasion)
Well, the day itself wasn't terribly cold -- had to be around 30.
I was skating on Argyle Lake in Babylon when the ice cracked, and I went into the water at least waist deep.
My jeans and long johns froze into sheets of ice, and I had to wait a good while for my father to come to pick me up.
This was back in the '50s, well before anyone had thought of cell phones.
When I moved from Anchorage back to San Diego in November 1990, I did it low budget by having a 40 foot trailer put in my driveway to fill with household goods. It was 40 below for the two days the trailer was there. Miserable isn't the word. We would haul boxes out and attempt to organize them in some efficient way, but it ended up a pretty big mess. I rented one of those jet engine heaters to try and make things more tolerable, but it didn't work very well.
The trailer went to the Port of Anchorage to be loaded on a ship en route to the rail terminal in Tacoma, Washington, where it went by train to LA for its final ride on wheels down the freeway to my house. Nine months later I moved to Minneapolis, but that's another story.
In Chargers lore, there's that playoff game in 1981 where Dan Fouts and the boys froze their tootsies in Cincy and played like do-do. A quick Google search says it was 59 below with wind chill. Of course this was the game right after the thriller in the heat and humidity of Miami, where Kellen Winslow Sr. almost died from dehydration. Gotta love football.
I covered the Panthers-Packers NFC title game in January of '97 when it was 3 degrees or so and stood on the field for the entire post-game ceremony just to say I did. I was standing on the frozen tundra, and honored to be there. There was very little wind, and thus it really wasn't all that bad. Wind always is the key.
Chilkoot: I missed the famous hook and ladder play by Miami on Jan. 2 because I was in the bathroom at the time at the Friendship Inn in suburban Washington. I was there for a friend's wedding. As I recall, it was about 70 degress on New Year's Day in D.C. that year. You could look it up.
Besides Black N Gold's comments...the coldest thing had to be playing hockey as a kid...
I don't know about global warming or anything, but it was colder back in the 60's and 70's. The ponds froze EVERY year...
We played in an outdoor rink...had to take ice-time at 5am coz' there weren't a lot of options...The Canadian kids from hockey camp taught us to skate with no socks, put plastic bags on our feet...it kept the sweat in...it actually worked...but on the really cold days, your hands would be the problem....and the snot in our noses would freeze...you would sniffle in and your nose-walls would stick together...that was pretty cold...almost as cold as going 0 for 4 in the Glaub-pool
CC: Great story, dude.
Hook: You played hockey. You are cool in my book, even if your picks are ... um ... a little off. I highlighted your name in the standings, because you are becoming increasingly famous as a result of your snarky comments on this blog.
January 19th 1994. I was living in Pittsburgh and training for my 30th marathon. I was working as an CTO for a large mortgage finance company and training twice a day.
My lunchtime runs were typically an easy 6 miles over Pittsburgh's hilly terrain. My training partner, a 'C' programmer for the company, was a nationally elite marathoner who had recently run a 2:16 marathon and was training for the 1994 Boston marathon. He approached my office that morning to confirm that were 'on' for our normal six mile effort.
It was -22 F !
Dressed in running gear, we made our way along our usual route. More than one motorist nearly swerved off the road seeing two idiots pounding the pavement.
I spent the rest of the afternoon, holed up in my office, with my work spread out in front of the heating vent, with a space heater turned up full blast.
January 1994 going to college in Saratoga Springs, NY. The thermometer on the outside of our house showed -42 which is when we all realized that fahrenheit actually gets colder than celsius at -40 so we actually learned something. I remember that it hurt your lungs to breathe in the air it was so cold.
When I was in high school in Chicago, I once went swimming in Lake Michigan with some friends. It was so cold that I couldn't even scream. My entire chest was red and totally numb.
In the winnter of 2002/03 I was a tv reporter for a low budget station in Utica NY. It was (-6) degrees and I had to shoot my own video (called a one-man-band). Anyways my news director wanted us to shoot our own standups (that's when the reporter stands in front of the camera and speaks...not live). I could barely talk, I couldn't wear gloves because its really hard to shoot a camera while wearing gloves and I had to memorize my lines. I wish I could say I was a hero, but alas, after four takes I decided my boss can fire me, but I was done.