In the rare case that you missed Sunday's game, woke up on Monday and checked the front page of the Virginian-Pilot's sports section to find out which team came out victorious, you would have learned that the Indianapolis Colts defeated the underdog New Orleans Saints by a score of 31-17.
In actuality, it was the Saints who bested the Colts by that same score.
"It's just one of those things," Maria Carrillo, the Virginian-Pilot's managing editor, told AOL News. "We went over every aspect of that story a dozen times. Everything but the score."
The newspaper, which is based in Norfolk, Va., caught its mistake before most readers, Carrillo said. On its Web site, the Virginian-Pilot posted an egg-on-face correction:
This morning's Virginian-Pilot Sports front featured a horrible error. We accidentally reversed the score of the Super Bowl.
In terms of morning-after gaffes, this is not quite the sports equivalent of "Dewey Defeats Truman." But word of the Virginian-Pilot's do-over has reached Twitter, where users seem to be having a good laugh at the paper's expense.We're embarrassed, and we apologize to all our readers, especially Saints fans.
One Twitter user, jasontspenser, summed the episode up nicely:
"We are trying to find a little humor in this right now," Carrillo said. "One of our funniest responses from a reader was 'Who dat proofreading your paper?'"Yes, Virginia, we need more copy editors.
