Just before I threw the biggest pass of my life, the sideline bomb that won the Super Bowl and completed one of the wildest slingshot rides you'll ever see in sports or anywhere else, I closed my eyes, savored the moment, and felt nothing but sincere, honestto-goodness joy.

It was a strange feeling to experience at the time, because my St. Louis Rams teammates and coaches were nervously pacing the sidelines, and there wasn't a whole lot of exhaling going on around me. By all rights, I should've been a stressed-out mess. The dream I've had since I first got out of diapers was slipping away like a football caked in Vaseline, but for some crazy reason, I couldn't stop smiling.

I had helped give my team a 16-0 advantage in Super Bowl XXXIV, but now the Tennessee Titans had made up the deficit, and 72,625 fans at the Georgia Dome -- and about 800 million watching TV across the world-were wondering whether we'd fold. The Titans had a bounce in their step, and for good reason: they had stopped our offense cold on the previous two drives, and for the third consecutive possession their offense had ripped through our extremely tired defense. As my teammates and I watched Al Del Greco's forty-three-yard field goal sail through the uprights to tie the game at 16-16 with two minutes and twelve seconds remaining, the oxygen on our sidelines grew dense, and the mood grew extremely tense.

Everyone looked at me to see how I would react, but I was eleven years and thousands of miles away, daydreaming about Joe Montana and the greatest Super Bowl finish of all time. As the world waited for a worthy encore, I stood there smiling, alone in my thoughts, a gleam in my eyes, head held high to the heavens.

One mistake, and our incredible, worst-to-first season would be obliterated. It was a daunting situation, but I wasn't worried about the possibility of pulling the biggest choke job in Super Bowl history. For one thing, I'd been confronted with far more intimidating circumstances in the past. When you've helped your soul mate throw her parents' ashes to the wind after they were killed in a freak tornado, when you've walked alone through the snow, digging your freezing hands into your pants pockets and trying to dredge up quarters for gas money while the woman and young children you love sit stranded and shivering alongside a freeway on-ramp, losing a football game-even that football game doesn't qualify as a disaster.

By the time that chilling conclusion was playing out, most people watching knew that five years earlier I'd stocked shelves at the Hy-Vee Supermarket in Cedar Falls, Iowa. But those long nights on the graveyard shift were hardly the lowest moments of my life; at least then I didn't have to worry where the next meal would come from, because I knew whatever goodies my coworkers and I dropped and damaged would go straight into our stomachs. Back then, I was struggling not only to resuscitate my football career but also to help provide for a young woman, Brenda Meoni, and her two young children, one of whom was mentally disabled. Brenda, who was my girlfriend at the time, did her shopping at the Hy-Vee -- and paid for her groceries with food stamps.

One snowy Sunday afternoon, when the four of us were holing up in the cold, dank basement of her parents' apartment, we decided to get into my GMC Jimmy and go for a ride. The Jimmy, purchased with the signing bonus I'd received from the Green Bay Packers a few months earlier, was the one luxury item I owned, and taking a drive seemed like the cheapest form of entertainment.

A few miles into our outing, two problems developed. The gas gauge hit empty, and we had no money to fill up the tank. It was one of those times late in the month when we were trying to stretch the pennies while waiting for a paycheck to come in, and now we were out in the cold. We figured we had enough gas to make it home, so we headed back toward Highway 218 and pulled onto the on-ramp. The car coughed, wheezed, and made that horrible noise, then chugged to an inglorious halt on the shoulder. The kids were in the backseat, shivering and crying. It was carcleaning time.

We scrounged around the vehicle, searching the floors and digging through the glove compartment, and scraped together as much change as we could-about a dollar ninety-five. I grabbed a gas can and hiked back toward the nearest filling station while Brenda and the kids froze their tushes off in the car. Fortunately, we were only a few blocks from a gas station, and I was able to buy enough fuel to get us home. But I'll never forget that walk, because I didn't have any gloves with me, so here I was, getting snowed on, shivering, with numb hands, rushing back while worrying that the kids were going to catch pneumonia.

Thankfully, we escaped from that predicament-and so many other trying times-with an even stronger sense of what our faith, priorities, and motivation should be. It's all about perspective, and when you've walked a few miles in my cleats, blowing a sixteen-point lead in the Super Bowl is nothing to get freaked out about. Besides, it wasn't as though I was a helpless bystander. The ball would be in my hands, and ever since I became the reluctant quarterback of my freshman team at Regis High School in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, that has usually been a good thing.

Long before people became captivated by my out-of-nowhere success story, I knew I was a pretty good quarterback, especially when it counted most. And though I was overlooked and underappreciated at every level after high school, I made the most of my...