Speaking of hare-brained travel schemes, as we did in the entry yesterday, the two NFL games today brought back more memories of bad ideas that somehow usually worked out. More or less. After great angst. And one that turned into a fairly spectacular (and perhaps life-threatening) disaster.

San Francisco home to the Packers, Denver at home and heavily favored, over the Baltimore Ravens.

Let’s crank up the Memory Machine.

(Before going any further, if only we had this thing called the “internet” up and running at my newspaper in the 1990s. I could just call up the things I wrote, and we would have a lot of the facts in one place. But almost nothing I wrote before, say, 2004, which probably encompasses 80-85 percent of my career production, is available online. Just not there. Crazy, but true.)

OK, first, the near-disasters: Games involving the 49ers in the playoffs in the 1990s. These were the Steve Young/George Seifert 49ers, and they were good. (And my hometown Rams and Raiders were bad.)

In the playoffs following the 1992 season, the 49ers defeated Washington in the Mud Bowl, a day when a week of rain turned the Candlestick Park field into perhaps the most ridiculous surface on which a modern NFL game has been played. (I refer to it at some length in this item; about halfway down.) Huge strips of turf came up on every play. It was a mess; a joke; unplayable, except it was football, and grounds are never unplayable.

The rain resumed as the game ended, and I killed the engine of my car when, in the pitch dark of the outer parking lots of that horrible stadium, I drove into a three-foot pool of water. I couldn’t get the car restarted. I couldn’t open the door because a foot of water would have poured in. I might have missed my plane out of San Jose except that some kind soul drove by, in the otherwise deserted parking lot, and asked me if I had put the automatic transmission in park.

Uh, no. No, I had not. I turned the key, the car fired up and off I went. The floorboards were soaked inside but I turned it in at the airport after the usual manic, shouting-at-traffic run down there, and I waited for Hertz (or whomever it was) to bill me for water damage. Never did.

But to the point … the Packers. The 49ers and Packers met in the playoffs five consecutive years (Brett Favre was the young-gun QB for the Packers) in the 1990s, and three of those games (1995, 1997, 1998) were in San Francisco. I am pretty sure I covered them all, and in the same way: Up at the crack of down, the drive to Ontario Airport, the flight to San Jose, the rental car, the mad dash up the 101 to that godforsaken mistake of a stadium, the four hours in the ridiculous press box, hopelessly jammed, overheated, people coughing, the muffled sound of the crowd outside the door, the grass-less fields down below, the cold and rain of San Francisco in January. I am getting depressed just thinking about it — yet I did it year after year.

The Denver-Baltimore game reminds me of perhaps the worst travel/coverage idea I ever had. Just spectacularly stupid. Not so much arrogant (but it was some of that) as just short-sighted. Encompassing the whole of my scheme. (I call it a “scheme” — think Lucille Ball — because it did not raise to the higher plain of a “plan”.)

Today, the Broncos were 13-3, top-seeded in the AFC, and had a first-round bye in the playoffs and got Baltimore in what the NFL calls the division playoffs. The Broncos were 10-point favorites.

Ahead of that game, some Denver fans and media recalled that in 1996, the Broncos were also 13-3, top-seeded in the AFC and had the first-round bye. After the bye, they got the Jacksonville Jaguars in the divisional round, in Denver. They were two-touchdown favorites.

So, back then, 1996, I decided I would cover that game. Because the 49ers that day were playing the Packers in Green Bay. That’s how this started. The 49ers being rude enough to have to go on the road.

(Oh, and I should note, this preference for driving: Mileage reimbursement on a personal car came out of a different — and bigger, and less closely scrutinized — part of the newspaper budget than did air travel, which was noted by everyone. So, to drive to Denver … I didn’t have to ask permission.)

This was my plan. My scheme. Leave SoCal on Friday afternoon, drive up the I-15 to the I-70, hang a right and go through eastern Utah and across the border to Grand Junction, Colorado. Stay the night there. Get up bright and early, drive over the Rockies in early January (Winter? No problem.), get to Denver a bit before kickoff, watch the game and report on it in depth. And after the game was over … to drive all the way from Denver back to SoCal. At night. As January 4 turned into January 5.

Mind, this is 975 miles by car, 14 hours under good conditions, and I was doing all the driving and in a Saturn, in January, with no winter gear.

Yeah.

It gets worse.

As in 1975 (recounted yesterday) I needed to rope someone into going with me. In this case, it was my son and our Welsh foreign-exchange student. They were 13 years old and 18, respectively. My son could not drive, and the Welshman didn’t have a U.S. driver’s license. Again, a problem. I would have to drive 100 percent of the time. Or nearly 2,000 miles in about 36 hours. At age 43.

We started late, which will come as no surprise to those who know me, and reeled off the 225 miles to Las Vegas in decent time, but the freeway traffic through the city was a mess (it was rush hour on a Friday; what a surprise). I started to get anxious.

Up through St. George and Cedar City, east on the I-70, into the near-total emptiness of south-central Utah, past the small town of Richfield, and into a night and a storm. It began to snow. I couldn’t stop because we had to be in Grand Junction that night. To, you know, drive over the Rockies ahead of kickoff the next morning. When it might snow more.

It was pitch dark. The storm clouds blocked the moonlight, if there had been a moon (why would I have checked?), and the lads looked out the window and chatted a bit about Wales and England and high school, and I got more and more and more tense because this drive was never going to end.

I suppose I suffered something like a panic attack. By the time I got to Grand Junction, after a harrowing three hours (more?) in the desolation of eastern Utah, my nerves were shot. I was jittery. My pulse was racing. I had not touched any caffeine; I was just losing it. I was overwhelmed by internal pressure — of my own creating.

(Wonder why; small car, two kids with me, in a hurry, in the dark, the snow, worried about getting caught in a drift or rear-ending someone caught in a drift, freezing to death on the shoulder of the I-70 in the early hours of January 4, a game to see, a drive back …)

When I woke in Grand Junction the next morning, after some spectacularly bad sleep, I heard a report of possible snow up in the mountains. That was it. Driving through snow … at 11,000 feet. In a Saturn. To cover the Broncos. If I got there alive. If I didn’t have a stroke or a heart attack in the process.

So, I did the first intelligent thing in more than 24 hours.

I quit. I gave up on a trip. For perhaps the only time in my career. This was too stupid, too grandiose and too ambitious even for me. And I wasn’t sure I could do it without falling over dead.

I headed back the other way on the I-70. I calmed fairly soon. In the light, and no snow, I could drive faster.

Off and on, we heard reports out of Denver. Jacksonville putting up a fight. Denver in trouble, Jacksonville winning the whole game 30-27 in a shocking upset. The final came at about the time we hit Las Vegas. The story of the weekend.

My instincts to want to go there were right. But my plan was ridiculous. Though I did salvage a self-deprecating column about it, Sunday for Monday morning. Which I would link you to if the piece had ever been posted online.

And I thought of that game tonight as I watched the 13-3, top-seeded Broncos lose at home to Baltimore in another memorable upset. The Drive to Hell.

And then the 49ers playing a sodden field on a cold San Francisco night? That brought back All Those Ugly Days at Candlestick.

Memories! Good ones? No. Not at all. But memories, nonetheless.