Concannon's career was a highlight reel

He was the BC Flutie before Flutie, the standard against which all post-1963 Boston College quarterbacks were to be judged.

He was on the cover of the 1963 NCAA Guide.

He was the Patriots' first pick in the 1964 draft.

He was the very first player ever presented to the American viewing public in instant replay.

He played himself in ''Brian's Song," and he was also in ''M*A*S*H," the movie.

Here's how good Jack Concannon was. ''Jack Concannon is the best quarterback I've seen since Harry Agganis," said Steve Sinko, who at the time happened to be the coach at Boston University, where referring to Agganis as a simple god is regarded as heresy.

Jack Concannon's heart gave out on him Monday morning at age 62. He left behind four children, 13 grandchildren, and an athletic legacy surpassed by few Boston-bred athletes in the past 50 years. His great misfortune was to predate both Boston College's foray into the big-time stage it occupies today and the communications explosion that we now take for granted. Make no mistake: Jack Concannon was one of BC's truly great ones.

Concannon was Boston through and through. First there was Dorchester, and how much more Boston can you get than someone raised in both Fields Corner and Ashmont? Then there was Matignon, and let's not quibble about the school being in Cambridge (in this discussion, Boston and Cambridge are interchangeable). And then there was BC.

The BC that Concannon entered in the fall of 1959 was a commuter school serving the needs of local people. BC played an intersectional schedule for sure (e.g. Houston, Iowa State, Texas Tech, Vanderbilt, Wichita State, Air Force), but the players were recruited by car and MTA, Concannon being no exception. The school had no exalted pretensions, be they academic, athletic, or social. BC was what it was, and Concannon was the classic BC recruit, which is to say a local boy making good.

Coach Ernie Hefferle didn't quite know what he had, which is why Concannon spent most of his sophomore season playing halfback. But Hefferle switched him to quarterback for the BU game, BC's eighth of the season, and the Eagles won, 10-7. But his true coming-out party as a collegian took place the following week when Ben Schwartzwalder brought his Syracuse Orangemen to town.

In one of those you-can't-make-this-stuff-up scenarios, Concannon came out of the infirmary to make a play that eyewitnesses are still babbling about 44 years later. Syracuse won the game behind the great Ernie Davis, but Concannon stole hearts and earned the admiration of Schwartzwalder with a 79-yard first-quarter gallop that ranks with any runs in BC history for sheer entertainment value.

Tom Fitzgerald covered the game for the Globe that day, and he was a notoriously hard marker. But in his game story, Fitzy was moved to observe, ''There was no question about Davis being the foremost back on the field, but the favorite of the Maroon and Gold partisans undoubtedly was Jack Concannon, the sophomore quarterback from Dorchester from the famed athletic family."

As to The Play itself, Fitzgerald described it as follows: ''Back to pass, deep in his own end of the field, Jack appeared trapped by a swarm of Syracuse defenders. When he failed to find an unguarded receiver, Jack decided he had better take off to salvage what he could of a bad situation. The salvage operation yielded far more than the lad hoped. Somewhere around the 40, he eluded the grasp of two or three prospective defenders. Then he broke wide to his right and went whizzing down inside the boundary. Safety man David Sofsian made a lunge for Jack at the five, but it was a despairing gesture."

Aren't you sorry you missed it?

One person who saw it was Eddie Miller, BC '57, who was then the BC sports information director and is an indispensable repository of BC historical wisdom and information.

''I remember it well," Miller recalls. ''It was the so-called 'Serpentine Run.' He ran right through everyone. And that run put him on the list of the pros because one of the people who saw it was [former Giants coach] Jim Lee Howell, who was then scouting for the organization. He was crazy about Jack."

Miller remembers a 6-foot-3-inch athlete who was ''lean and mean" and equally dangerous with his arm and his legs.

''They didn't time people in the 40s in those days," Miller says, ''but I can tell you that he was timed in about 10 seconds flat [in the 100] in his football uniform."

His BC greatness was not confined to the gridiron. He was also a pitcher and outfielder on two Eddie Pellagrini-coached teams that went to the College World Series.

The replay story? The newfangled gizmo was first supposed to be used in a Texas game in 1962, but it wasn't quite ready. It was unveiled for the BC-Holy Cross game the following week and Concannon was the first subject.

The NCAA Guide cover? ''That was quite a coup for us," says Miller, the man who got it done. ''That was big in those days."

Concannon emerged from BC as the school's all-time passing yardage leader, despite not playing QB in his first seven games. He was the 1963 winner of the Bulger Lowe Award as the premier college football player in New England. And he was the object of a bidding war between the Patriots, who drafted him No. 1, and the Eagles.

As badly as the Patriots wanted the BC guy, he signed with Philadelphia for a very good reason: They offered twice as much money. That led him into a 10-year NFL career for the Eagles, Bears, Packers, and Lions, his best year coming for Chicago in 1970, when he threw for 2,130 yards. His career rushing average was a predictably impressive 4.7 yards per carry.

Oh, yes, ''Brian's Song." He was a very close friend of Brian Piccolo's.

Concannon was a lovable man and a good teammate, but he had his flaws and his demons and he did not always have a smooth post-career life. In fact, he made some astonishingly bad judgments. But he was able to steer himself into a contented middle age and those who knew and loved him were well aware that throughout his life there were two abiding loves: his family and his school.

Jack and Ginny Concannon raised four children: Jack Jr., Christa, Kelly, and Kara, and they all graduated from BC. He had relocated in Waltham after living in Chicago and he reattached himself to the alma mater, attending all the home football games and famously sitting in the rain for every last play of this year's Wake Forest game.

The children provided him with 13 grandchildren, and they will all dearly miss the man they called Poppy.

''He was a guy who loved his children and his grandchildren," says son Jack. ''The last years of his life were spent enjoying his family. He and my mom were always booked up, babysitting."

Anybody have a home movie of the Serpentine Run hanging around? The grandkids deserve to know just how great Poppy was on those glorious Saturday afternoons before anyone ever heard of ''SportsCenter." Or Doug Flutie.

Bob Ryan is a Globe columnist. His e-mail address is ryan@globe.com.