The Hills are alive with the sound of another musical...
Today marks the 35th Anniversary of the Heidi Game, a very close Jets-Raiders contest which was pre-empted by NBC to show the movie Heidi. Normally, cutting out only the lat 1:05 of the game wouldn't mean that much, but the Raiders managed to score 14 points in that 65 seconds: A Daryle Lamonica pass to Charlie Smith, followed by a muffed kickoff return picked up and run in by Preston Ridlehuber. Those points turned the game from a 32-29 Jets lead to a 43-32 Raiders victory, and forever changed the face of sports broadcast policy.

The game overran its time slot, and NBC had sold the 7-9 advertising slot to Timex for their made-for-TV pigtailed wench, or whatever the Hell she was supposed to be. Their policy at the time didn't allow for "sliding" shows to accommodate late-running sports contests, so the network's supervisor of broadcast operation control switched over.

Today, networks have figured out that if games run long, they can charge more for the advertising - so we have more TV time outs. Great.