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The Greatest Team Never to Make It: An Oral History of the 1998 Vikings

The Minnesota Vikings didn’t have a losing season from 1992 to 1997, though the team was becoming synonymous with its lack of playoff success—five times in those six years the Vikings went to the postseason, but only once did they make it even to the divisional round. Built by Dennis Green as a new-age Bill Walshian experiment, Minnesota seemed destined to become a forgettable subplot of the Aikman/Favre/Young/Elway/era.

That’s when Green started talking about a player who might fall to his team in the upcoming draft. The story of the 1998 Vikings, arguably one of the best and most heartbreaking teams in NFL history, begins here, 20 years ago …

Marie Green, Dennis’s wife: He had been talking about Randy Moss for weeks.