When everything changed, as the dust literally settled on the most brutal terror attack on United States soil, the prevailing impulse among NFL owners was to play the games.At the time, it was hard to believe. In retrospect, it’s a blessing that they didn’t get their way.Twenty-five years ago, as a stunned nation coped with the ramifications of a coordinated attack that exploited our imperfect homeland security procedures and killed nearly 3,000 innocent victims, many NFL owners insisted — some of them quite loudly — that the games must go on as scheduled.They wanted to make a statement to the terrorists that the wheels of commerce would not be stopped, which conveniently benefited their own bottom lines.Ultimately, they were shouted down, most notably by the men who’d be told to don helmets and shoulder pads and smack one another into submission. History has judged those players kindly.A quarter-century after 9/11, it seems unfathomable to surmise that a grieving nation could embrace a football Sunday as bodies were still being pulled from the rubble.And yet, in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan and the Pentagon in Arlington, Va., most owners were intent on staging a full slate of games five days later. The players who successfully pushed back were the voices of reason.As one prominent owner told me in the lead-up to the 10th anniversary of the horrific act of aggression, “Most of the owners thought we should play the games, and when (then-commissioner Paul Tagliabue) made the decision to wait a week, internally it was not a popular one. He took a risk, but he did what he felt was right. And I think, looking back, we’d all agree it was the respectful and appropriate move.”Tagliabue, who died in November, had a strong working relationship with NFL Players Association executive director Gene Upshaw, whose constituency strongly favored pausing the action to assess the situation. By Sept. 13, the two men were aligned: There would be no games that weekend.When I revisited the decision with Tagliabue in 2011, he conceded that many of the owners who employed him weren’t thrilled with that news.“But in my mind,” he explained, “you couldn’t continue with business as usual, because this was not business as usual. This was a cosmic, unprecedented event, and playing football games that weekend was not appropriate.”It seems like an obvious calculus now, but at the time the NFL made it much more complicated. Competitive and logistical factors came into play.There were 31 teams in 2001, meaning at least one (in this case, the San Diego Chargers) had a bye each week. Losing Week 2 completely and keeping the rest of the schedule intact would have forced the Chargers to play 16 games while everyone else played 15, one of the factors that convinced Tagliabue to move Week 2 to the end of the regular season.That season, however, there was only a one-week break between the conference championship games and the Super Bowl, depriving the league of its normal buffer zone. Tagliabue and the owners toyed with eliminating a playoff round (meaning only four teams in each conference would qualify for the postseason, rather than six) or keeping the full field intact but staging midweek games during the wild-card round, with quick turnarounds.The other option, pushing the Super Bowl back a week, was initially rejected because New Orleans, the host city, had booked an automobile dealers’ convention that had gobbled up most of the desirable hotel rooms.Once it was announced that there would be no games played in Week 2, there was a lot of discussion about how the league should proceed. It was hardly the most important discourse in a country experiencing a collective state of shock, sadness, anger and fear.If you’re too young to remember that scary time — or weren’t born yet — it’s hard to convey how seismic and jolting it was.For most of our history as a country, and certainly in the post-World War II nuclear era, our borders felt impenetrable. Terrorism wasn’t a completely foreign concept, but the notion of a hostile, coordinated attack on our soil, at that scale, seemed like something that might only happen in a Tom Clancy novel or a summer blockbuster movie.Airports had some safeguards in place, but not enough. Before 9/11, it was completely plausible that a passenger might throw a duffel bag onto the X-ray machine belt, yell “My flight leaves in five minutes!” while practically jogging through a low-tech metal detector, grab the bag, sprint to the gate and make it onto the plane before it taxied to the runway.I know, because I was that guy on occasion, sometimes while accompanying a heavily tattooed future basketball Hall of Famer blasting Pearl Jam on his boombox.When it turned out that terrorists who’d attended flight schools in the U.S. were able to bring box cutters through security and use them to overtake commercial flights and fly them into buildings — well, it made many of us feel as though the earth beneath us had shifted in unimaginable ways.Our society was different then, in ways younger citizens might find hard to fathom.For example, on the evening of Sept. 11, members of Congress from both political parties stood on the marble steps of the Capitol. They broke into an impromptu rendition of “God Bless America.”In the days that followed, the news footage and descriptions of the devastation were haunting and omnipresent. So many people were touched by the attack, and NFL circles were no exception.New England Patriots guard Joe Andruzzi had three brothers, all New York City firefighters, who — like so many of their brave counterparts — rushed to the World Trade Center in an attempt to save lives after the towers were struck.Jacksonville Jaguars coach Tom Coughlin spent 45 gut-wrenching minutes pacing through the team’s training facility while vainly trying to get ahold of his son, Tim, who worked on the 60th floor of Two World Trade. He finally got through to Tim’s cellphone as his son finished a long trip down the stairwell and reached the ground floor, 20 minutes before the building collapsed.And, of course, Pat Tillman, a 25-year-old Arizona Cardinals safety, who enlisted in the Army the following spring in response to the attacks, turning down a three-year, $3.6 million contract offer. Two years later, Tillman, a corporal in the U.S. Army Rangers, was killed in Afghanistan by friendly fire.In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, one common theme was that people wanted to help however they could.In June, when I accompanied New York Giants coach John Harbaugh on an unannounced team outing to the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, former Giants linebacker Jessie Armstead spoke to a rapt audience about how he and his teammates experienced the event.The defending NFC champion Giants had opened their season on a Monday night in Denver and landed early the next morning — Tuesday, Sept. 11 — at Newark airport. Fewer than three hours later, United Flight 93, which had departed the same terminal at Newark for San Francisco, was hijacked with the intent to target a site in Washington, D.C. Passengers attempted to storm the cockpit, and the jet crashed into a field in rural Pennsylvania.Armstead, his voice rising and his eyes wide, told the current Giants players that after two other hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Center’s 110-story twin towers, he could see the flames from across the Hudson River at his New Jersey residence.In the hours that followed, he and some teammates showed up at a staging area in Jersey City to help rescue workers. Four days later, 35 Giants players were ferried across the Hudson in police boats and transported to Ground Zero, where they offered moral support to rescue workers searching for survivors in the rubble.Flags fly at half-mast outside an empty Soldier Field in Chicago on the first Sunday after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. (Scott Olson / Getty Images)Players around the country were shaken, uncertain about the safety of air travel and whether their families would be safe from potential acts of terror to follow. For the Giants, New York Jets, Washington Redskins and Pittsburgh Steelers, that stress was compounded by their proximity to the impacted sites.Before the Week 2 games were canceled, on an Upshaw-led conference call surveying members of the NFLPA’s executive committee, Michael Strahan, then a star defensive end for the Giants, was particularly animated and upset. Strahan described the chaos in New York City amid the rescue efforts and the accompanying bomb threats and noted that the Giants could still see smoke from the twin towers from the team’s practice fields.“That,” former Tennessee Titans star running back Eddie George recalled in 2011, “really made the decision … Michael’s description.”Major League Baseball players expressed similar emotions amid a pause to the season in the wake of the attacks, with games resuming on Sept. 17. Derek Jeter, the New York Yankees’ star shortstop, explained his stance to reporters in stark terms: “They’re still trying to find people. I really don’t think it’s the right time to play baseball.”In the end, waiting until Sept. 23 to return to the field (“Thursday Night Football” did not yet exist) proved to be the right move for the NFL. Tagliabue and Upshaw, who died in 2008, were together in Kansas City that Sunday, and the commissioner got chills as an Arrowhead Stadium crowd gave the visiting Giants a huge ovation as they took the field, with “KC ♥ NY” banners displayed in the stands.Members of the Kansas City Chiefs wave flags as they enter the stadium before a game against the New York Giants, the first after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. (Elsa / Getty Images)Though initially inclined to reduce the playoff field and shave off a week of the postseason, the owners chose a better tack: They threw money (and tickets) at the problem, paid off the car dealers and swapped dates, which gave us the first February Super Bowl.It was a memorable one, with the upstart Patriots and newly installed starter Tom Brady stunning the “Greatest Show on Turf” St. Louis Rams on a last-second, walk-off field goal.It was the first of six Super Bowl triumphs for Patriots owner Robert Kraft, who invoked “the special spirit of America” as Tagliabue presented him with the Lombardi Trophy after the game.“We’re proud to be a symbol of that in a small way,” Kraft told the Superdome crowd and a massive television audience. “Spirituality, faith and democracy are the cornerstones of our country. We are all patriots, and tonight the Patriots are world champions.”It was an ambitious attempt to equate a moment of athletic triumph with a nation’s struggle to move forward after a devastating tragedy. Yet as a collective, the NFL owners did not deserve a victory lap.Given that Tagliabue’s long-serving predecessor, Pete Rozelle, had once said his biggest regret was not canceling the Sunday games after the Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the commissioner’s call to pause the season in the aftermath of 9/11 might have seemed like a no-brainer.Maddeningly, many of the owners believed plowing ahead and playing was the right approach. At that perilous moment, the players put football in perspective and sensed the historical implications of failing to acknowledge the event’s gravity.“We were still in a state of shock,” George recalled a decade after the attack. “We didn’t know what would happen next. When you see the World Trade Center crumbling before your eyes, and it’s real, cheering for a team in a stadium doesn’t seem realistic.“We decided, ‘This is a great American tragedy that will be talked about for 100 years or more, long after we’re gone. It’s bigger than the game.’ ”