It was Sept. 1 in another time, the morning after the Browns had completed a 2-2 preseason with a 23-20 loss to the Carolina Panthers at Charlotte.

I was out for my morning walk under bright, blue, sunny skies, doing laps around the hotel in Greensboro, NC where Bill Rabinowitz, then the Browns beat writer for the Columbus Dispatch and I had stayed. I walked past where his rental car was parked and found the fact that it was still there to be strange. He should have left already. His flight back to Columbus was scheduled to depart about an hour before mine to Cleveland, and I was going to finish my walk in about 20 minutes and take the hotel shuttle to the airport located about three minutes away.  But I let the thought pass, because that was his business, not mine.

I saw Bill at practice at Browns headquarters in Berea a couple days later and he gave me the wild account of what had happened. Apparently, the person working the front desk of the hotel forgot to give him his wake-up call. Bill woke up on his own and was shocked to see that his flight was supposed to leave in exactly 14 minutes.

He frantically called the front desk to explain his problem and to make sure that there was a shuttle waiting to rush him to the airport so he could try to make his flight.

“I knew there was no chance to get there in time, but I had to give it a shot,” Bill said.

When he got to the airport, he raced through ticketing and the security checkpoint as if running the 400 yard dash. The attendant there completed the express-lane service and he whisked onto the entrance to the plane.

After waking up in his hotel room 14 minutes before his flight was scheduled to take off, somehow, some way, Bill did indeed made his flight.

When he finished telling me the story, we both had a good laugh.

It turned out to be gallows humor.

That was 23 years ago, and on a bright, clear, sunny morning 10 days after Bill’s big adventure, on Sept. 11, 2011, terrorists highjacked four planes and caused nightmarish chaos, beginning with crashing two of them into the Twin Towers in New York.

What we found out later was that the terrorists had plotted this attack for years, and as they did, they saw countless instances like the one involving Bill Rabinowitz and realized that carrying bombs onto planes undetected was going to be the easiest part of the whole plan.

Steve King

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