Watching the game yesterday, it hit me that it has been X years (10 to you non-Romans) since my big break came when I worked on the SuperBowl.com site for the 1999 game between Denver and Atlanta.

The biggest change in that time is how SuperBowl.com handles news. The site was being produced and managed at Lycos under the strict guidance of the NFL which means at that time the site was just NFL propaganda. That was the year that Eugene Robinson of Atlanta found himself arrested for solicitation the night before the game. Big news, obviously, but we were not allowed by the NFL to mention it. The rules were so strict on blocking bad news that we were not allowed to even link to articles where coaches were being fired, and that’s all of the news during the weeks of the playoff run.

My involvement started as a photo editor for a six-week contract which became an offer to be the Lycos Search Producer. By Super Bowl night, I had worked myself up to where they trusted me with the keys to the whole site so I was publishing content from a dark, cold office park in Waltham until late into the night with my developer Mats. That was the year that Denver beat my Jets in the AFC Championship. I always wondered if I would have been able to come up with the pitch to go to Miami if the Jets were in the Super Bowl … if the Jets were Super Bowl (I seem to say that alot). My confetti celebration that night was a leftover pizza and a couple of beers around 3am while I watched game highlights on ESPN. There is nothing like game day.