Unlike Alabama’s finish against LSU, moving down the field with four perfect passes to victory, Georgia’s 80-yard last-minute drive against Alabama in the SEC championship game ended with no timeouts, a tipped pass and lots of second-guessing. Players, coaches and fans now live with the agonizing what-ifs and coulda-beens that will haunt us for as long as the game is remembered.

With time, though, aided by the ability to go back and look at the game again, what now seems an ignominious defeat will reveal itself to be an extremely hard-fought contest between two evenly matched teams who both played their hearts out and made great plays and some mistakes. Time ran out with Georgia behind, but when they stop gritting their teeth over that final play and look at the game as a whole, they’ll feel a lot better about the season’s end.

It took my teammates over 50 years to get that perspective.

Our team won the high school region football championship after a hard-fought season that ended with only one defeat and one tie, and a playoff game in which we beat the team that had beaten us during the season. Next, we were to play Monticello for the North Georgia championship, but first we had a three-week layover before we played them. We were one of the few remaining teams that ran the old single-wing formation, a slow-moving, team-blocking form of football that had been pretty much superseded by the split-T formation. To keep us interested during the long wait for the championship game, our coaches spent our practice time installing a new split-T offense.

When the game finally arrived, Monticello beat us 20-6, while we doggedly ran our old single-wing, our split-T never unveiled. My memory of that night is of fast and shifty backs who eluded our attempts to tackle them—a crushing defeat. In fact, my memory telescopes that game down into a single image: I’m playing linebacker; their halfback bowls through a hole in our line; I move up to tackle him; he fakes right, cuts left, and goes on for a long gain. That was my snapshot memory of the game, and though I tried not to dwell on it over the years, it came to sum up our season.

Now, a film of that game has surfaced. Turns out, Monticello filmed all their games, and through an encounter between one of our teammates and one of theirs, we have been able to watch again that game that occurred over 50 years ago.

There we are, the Greensboro Tigers. Curtis Underwood at left end, Aubrey McElhannon at left guard, Andrew Boswell at center (replaced by Cotton Boswell when he got knocked out), Carey Williams at right guard, Lewis Brown at tackle, Bobby Ivie at tackle (our line was overbalanced to the right), Earl Strickland at end, and in the backfield our great All-State triple-threat tailback Roger Glass, along with Sonny Thurmond, Robert Callaway and me, and Hale Burnett when Robert got hurt.. And we all played defense, too, so we were on the field 60 minutes, except when Donald Dennis came in on defense for Robert Callaway.

Our coaches, G.M. Charles and Charlton Veazey, are dead. We lost Roger, Donald and Cotton this year and Aubrey the year before. In watching the film, Sonny Thurmond spotted it first: It wasn’t a debacle; it wasn’t a rout. We played our hearts out. We played them to a standstill. We almost beat them. Almost. We led at the half, the first time they had ever been behind at the half. We had a touchdown called back that would have put us again into the lead. We didn’t quit. We didn’t give up; we finally gave out, and they scored again at the end of the game. We missed tackles, but we made a lot. Our memories of the game were wrong, and there, after all these years, is the proof. Through the magic of the grainy black-and-white film, we run and block and tackle again, and before our older eyes our long-ago effort is redeemed: a bitter memory of defeat leavened with a grudging pride.

The Dogs, too, should soon regain their respect for what they accomplished during this season and in that championship game. With the perspective of time, they’ll find that the proof is right there on the film—and they don’t have to wait 50 years to see it.