“Is it getting a little warm in here?” asked a fellow journalist sat next to me perched high up in the rafters in the press box at the Superdome.

In hindsight now we know why, but at the time we were trying to make sense of the choas on the pitch after the Ravens had just taken a commanding lead.

The Superdome is loud, seriously loud. Even with the crowd split between the two teams, the roars and cheers were still reverberating from below, ricocheting off the roof and hammering our ear drums.

Then it happened. Our monitors went off, the scoreboard disappeared, the stadium announcer’s booming voice was silenced and the majority of the stadium’s lights went out.

Apart from some emergency lighting, darkness engulfed the Superdome. And silence. Such an eerie experience in such a huge building.

A riotous cauldron of noise was turned into a shadowy cavern of worried murmurings and disbelief – with nobody having a clue what was happening.

Players searched for their families in the stands, some stretched and some just sat down, bemused, as NFL officials ran about looking to find what the problem was, and the solution.

There was precious little communication, as we tried to call, email, get in contact with someone, somewhere, with some knowledge of the situation.

Once the spectre of something more threatening was ruled out, a power outage was given as the reason, and after the most famous half an hour of darkness in American sports history, we were ready to get back under way.

The silence heard around the world was broken, the blackout watched by hundreds of millions was over – but the story was very much not.