As the clock ticked down on a lopsided football game that was anything but memorable, Baltimore Colts season ticket holder Jim Ripken experienced an unforgettable close call.

Ripken, then 30, was pondering an early exit when he noticed a low-flying plane hovering over Memorial Stadium as the Pittsburgh Steelers were enjoying the final moments of a 40-14 rout on Dec. 19, 1976.

That was the last time the Steelers competed in an NFL playoff game in Baltimore — a drought that will end Saturday night when Pittsburgh plays the Ravens at M&T Bank Stadium at 8 p.m.

Ripken was attending the game with his brother-in-law Butch Cougle and sitting in the upper deck in row 13 when the blue-and-white Piper Cherokee became a distraction as it flew above the stadium. The lopsided score meant most of the crowd of 60,000 fans had left the game, which might have saved dozens of lives.

Moments after the final whistle, the plane, flown by fired MTA bus driver Donald N. Kroner, crashed into the mostly empty upper deck near the seats where Ripken, who had already headed to the exit ramp, had just watched the Colts lose.

“I don’t think we even got out of the stadium before the guy hit,” said Ripken, a lifelong Baltimore resident who is a retired steel plant manager and a distant cousin to Cal Ripken Jr. “He hit — best I can tell — not much more than 100 feet from where our seats were. I looked at the photos and was like ‘holy crap,’ I’m glad we got out of there.”

The crashed plane still had fuel in its tank and sheared off its left wing, which scattered debris in the upper deck and injured three Baltimore police officers, according to a report by the Evening Sun. Kroner, who also went by the nickname Blue Max, was pulled from the wreckage and amazingly was not seriously injured.

Police found a roll of toilet paper, a can of yellow spray paint and a can of spray snow inside the cockpit, The Evening Sun reported. Kroner also had written a note to Colts’ quarterback Bert Jones that said: “To Bert Jones, QB, from Blue Max. Good luck, you B-more Colts.”

The late Vince Bagli, then a popular TV sportscaster, was shocked by the incident.

“I was walking down to the Colts’ dressing room and heard this rumbling sound,” Bagli told The Baltimore Sun at the time. “I thought someone had rolled a garbage can down the ramp until I looked out and saw the plane sitting upstairs.”

Kroner was charged with malicious destruction of property, reckless flying and violating the law that prohibits flying over the stadium, according to The Sun report. Three days later, he was taken to Baltimore City Hospital, now Johns Hopkins Bayview, for a psychiatric evaluation.

It wasn’t Kroner’s first brush with the law.

The Baltimore Sun reported that Kroner had been arrested by Baltimore County Police earlier that month and charged with reckless flying, littering and making a bomb threat against Bill Pellington, a former Colts player who owned a Timonium restaurant. Kroner was apparently angry about being thrown out of the restaurant. As a result, he flew his plane over Pennington’s restaurant roof to drop rolls of toilet paper and a bottle on the roof.

For his antics at Memorial Stadium, Kroner was sentenced to two years in prison. However, he served only three months, but his pilot’s license was revoked, according to The Sun.

“I didn’t try to kill anybody or kill myself,” he said at the time. “I’m sorry it happened. I can’t see out of my right eye from being hit by a pipe while in city jail. I’ve never been in trouble before and will never be in trouble again.”

Fallston resident Mike Tich was an 11-year-old fan attending that game with his father. They were sitting in the lower bowl and would have been looking directly at the plane wreck from the other side of the stadium.

“We were getting destroyed so we decided to leave a little early,” said Tich, now a Ravens season ticket holder. “I remember hearing about it on the radio. It was unimaginable, something I couldn’t even comprehend back then.”

As for Ripken, he will never forget the day he might have cheated death.

“This airplane was slowly circling around toward the end of the game, and we didn’t think all that much of it at first,” Ripken said. “You typically saw airplanes flying overhead with signs and what have you. But as it got close to the end, the guys started coming down lower and lower and lower. We were trying to figure out what he was trying to do. It looked like he was crazy, or just stupid.”

Have a news tip? Contact Todd Karpovich at tkarpovich@baltsun.com or on X as @ToddKarpovich.