It was Nov. 20, 1977, and the Chicago skies were a typically ghostly gray, the winds howling off the lakefront, the scent of snow in the air.

	To many, Walter Payton was the greatest football player of all-time.

"Do we really want to go to this game, guys?" Dad asked my younger brother and me.

It was a good question. We weren't really Bears fans, having moved one year earlier from New York, where our allegiances went to our beloved New York Football Giants. And, frankly, the Bears were a team virtually devoid of flair, a regular loser in the 1970s, a team featuring legends such as (gag) Bob Avellini, Vince Evans, Kenny Margerum and Brian Baschnagel. The tickets were freebies from my dad's office. Why, he wondered, should we put on 72 layers of clothes to go to a frigid old stadium to watch a bad football team?

"Let's go," I said.

"Let's go," my brother said.

We went.

And then we watched history. Then we watched something none of us will ever forget. Then we watched Walter Payton, who died Monday at the too-tender age of 45, run for an NFL single-game-record 275 yards in a 10-7 victory over Minnesota. We saw him run that sweep time after time behind (remember him?) Revie Sorey. We saw him take on tacklers the way nobody since Jim Brown took on tacklers. We saw him lower his shoulder and kick his knees until they seemed to touch his chin, a style his former teammate, Al Harris, likened to "a man with a fever."

What we didn't know, at least not until the next day when we read it in the newspaper, was that Payton had the flu and wondered during introductions whether he'd make it through the afternoon.

It was the greatest thing I had ever seen to that point in my life, in person or on television. But you know the thing I remember? It was the eerie sound of muffled applause, the sound of 40,000 people applauding madly while wearing gloves or mittens. Somehow, it didn't seem rousing enough, or adulatory enough.

Finally, at one point, I remember ripping off the gloves, and I remember my dad turning to me and giving me the look he often gave me as a teenager.

"What are you doing?" he asked incredulously.

I didn't respond.

Let me say this as yet another in a long line of tributes to Sweetness: He wasn't just the greatest running back I ever saw. He was the greatest football player I ever saw.

And still is.

Maybe it's an end-of-the-millennium thing, but it seems we are now compelled to rank everybody, to establish where everybody fits into this sports century. We did it with Wilt just a short time back -- again, along with Payne Stewart, these tragic losses happening in threes -- and now, I imagine, we will do the same with Sweetness.

Was he, in fact, the greatest running back who ever played the game?

Jim Brown, who your father will tell you was the greatest runner ever, quit the game at a time when he had many productive years left in his career.

And Barry Sanders, who needed only 1,458 yards to break Payton's mark, decided to retire -- possibly just temporarily -- before mounting a final assault on the record.

Statistically, yes, if Brown had kept playing, if Sanders had continued his career, Payton's numbers would have been left in the dust. But I believe there is a very strong and compelling case for Walter Payton.

The thing you have to look at first is where he played and with whom he played. This is a runner who played his entire career on snow- and rain-slicked fields in the NFC Central, who played in frigid conditions where footing was near impossible. And he played on an absolutely wretched Bears team on which he was the only man a defense had to target. For all the encomiums Payton sent his teammates' way, the fact is, he had Avellini and Evans and Mike Phipps at quarterback and an equally anonymous cast at the other skill positions. It wasn't until the Super Bowl Shuffle Bears of 1985 that Payton was surrounded by a team with championship aspirations.

Brown, you will remember, played for powerhouse Cleveland Browns teams that dominated the 1960s. And while Sanders, like Payton, was the one bright and shining light on a terrible Detroit team, he played half his entire career in optimal conditions, inside a dome and on artificial turf.

What you look at most closely, though, is Payton's longevity, durability and consistency.

He had 10 seasons in which he rushed for more than 1,000 yards. And, perhaps most remarkable -- and especially now in a season when all the top backs are going down with terrible injuries -- Sweetness played in 184 consecutive games. In 13 years, he missed one game, and that was a coach's decision during his rookie season, when he had a bum ankle.

In a way, Payton is football's answer to Hank Aaron. The home run king never had more than 50 homers in a single season but finished his career with 755. That was Payton. Every game, every year, as dependable as a gloomy Chicago day in November.

"It's grossly unfair to judge Walter Payton solely on the yards he gains," former Bears general manager Jim Finks said when Payton was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. "He is a complete football player, better than Jim Brown, better than O.J. Simpson."

With Payton, his was a consistency that transcended the football field: His consistency of character was unquestioned. And in the pantheon of the game's greatest running backs, that's no small issue. Brown is nobody's angel. Simpson -- well, you know that story. Even Sanders, long viewed as a man of uncommon virtue, has taken heat for his decision to bolt the Lions and leave football under questionable circumstances.

But you never heard the ugly stories about Payton. What you heard about was his selflessness. What you heard about was his unrivaled work ethic and the way he willed himself to become one of the first big stars out of a predominantly black college. What you heard about was his sense of humor, and his impersonations of Mike Ditka and, yes, Buckwheat. When Ditka made the silly mistake of sending in the Fridge for a garbage touchdown during the Super Bowl instead of Payton, all of Chicago took up Payton. Ditka later apologized.

Most recently, though, you heard less about his wonderful family and his varied business interests and more about his rare liver disease. For a time, there was hope he could be saved by a liver transplant. That never happened.

There are reports now that it never could have happened. He was too sick and too weak from other health complications to be saved by a transplant.

"I'm not afraid of dying," he recently told Sports Illustrated.

"Everybody has to die."

Then he paused. "I'm afraid I'm not going to be here to see the things I feel I have a right to see: my son playing college football, my daughter graduating from college, my kids having kids."

In his final days, he took refuge in his family and the thousands of kind words and gestures of people not only in the football community but the human community.

"Christopher says I shouldn't be scared," Payton said after reading a letter from a 9-year-old. "God will take care of me."

He wiped a tear from his eyes as he read that note.

Today, it's our turn.

Bob Kravitz writes for the Rocky Mountain News.