Alan Abrahamson • E-mail

LOS ANGELES - The Oakland Raiders' JaMarcus Russell had just thrown his second interception of the first half Thursday, and as the San Diego Chargers defense moved the ball back the other way, the crowd here at the Mann's Chinese 6 theater oohed and ahhed.

Not at the throw. It was, after all, a horrid throw by an awful quarterback playing for a terrible team in a crummy game on a Thursday night in early December that the Chargers would ultimately win, 34-7.

"You know that looked good in 3-D," the play-by-play announcer, Ron Pitts, said.

It sure did. Or, as color guy Billy Ray Smith said to the invited crowds — gathered in theaters in Los Angeles, New York and Boston to don special glasses and catch the first live broadcast of an NFL game in 3-D — that is "exactly the kind of play you're hoping for."

The broadcast Thursday night, marked by technical glitches and production shortcomings, nonetheless marked — without question, unequivocally, indisputably — a signal event in the history of television and the NFL.

In time, the event Thursday — when 3-D events are the norm in theaters, on gaming platforms, even on your home television — will come to be seen as one of those transformative moments in our culture.

It will be seen as a sports moment akin to the rock concert the influential critic, Jon Landau, saw in 1974, when he famously declared, "I saw Rock and Roll's future and its name is Bruce Springsteen."

I saw the NFL's future Thursday. Its name is 3-D.

To be clear: It won't be immediate. Maybe not even in three years or five. But eventually, and probably sooner than later.

Fifty years after the Colts and Giants ushered in the modern television era in the 1958 championship game, the so-called "greatest game ever played," the time has arrived for the next dimension.

Doubters: TV has gone from black and white to color to cable to satellite to hi-def. What's the logical next step?

"This is it," said audience member Rachel Miller, a 27-year-old owner and president of Tom Sawyer Entertainment, a Beverly Hills-based management and production company. "This is the future."

To be sure, there are doubters. They were in the house Thursday.

"It's interesting and enjoyable," said 33-year-old Jesse Hara, a managing partner at Tom Sawyer. "But like most technological experiences, this doesn't account for the shared experience that is a football game.

"I don't see that in three or 10 years everyone is going to bring their 3-D goggles to the bar. It takes you out of that shared experience."

But, said Jeff Suhy, 42, who works at Akamai's Los Angeles office, "I'm 180 degrees the other way because 99.9 percent of football fans want to be closer to the game. This brings the size, the pain, the power of those guys on the field. The extra-dimension stuff brings you that much closer to the game."

The production Thursday highlighted both the promise of 3-D and the challenges yet to be solved.

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