Twenty-five years later, Dave Lapham still feels the effects.

For him, and many of the other participants in the "Freezer Bowl," the game isn’t just a memory.

Wednesday marks the 25 th anniversary of the AFC championship game between the Bengals and the San Diego Chargers. On Jan. 10, 1982, Cincinnati beat the Chargers 27-7 to send the Bengals to their first Super Bowl, but that’s not the main reason the game has gone down in NFL lore.

Never before and not since has a game been played in colder conditions. The wind chill at the opening kick was minus-59 degrees. More than 46,000 fans attended.

"I’ve never been that cold in my life," said Lapham, then a Bengals offensive lineman and now a broadcaster for the team. "That bad boy lowered my thermostat, no doubt. It changed me. If it gets really cold, I get the red blotches like I did in that game."

For the Bengals, the first sign that the game would be like no other came when cars wouldn’t start at the team hotel.

"We had to commandeer cars," place-kicker Jim Breech recalled. "Some waitress took us down to the game. We all went down in her Camaro."

San Diego quarterback Dan Fouts remembers riding to Riverfront Stadium on the team bus and looking down at the Ohio River.

"When we drove to the stadium, the river was steaming because the water was so much warmer than the air," Fouts said. "That was the first clue we were in trouble."

San Diego had advanced to the AFC title game with a thrilling 41-38 comeback victory over the Miami Dolphins the week before. The Bengals were coming off the first playoff victory in franchise history, 28-21 over Buffalo.

Under normal conditions, the game likely would have been a shootout between two of the NFL’s most explosive offenses. Instead, the teams had to fight the elements as much as they did each other.

"We knew it was going to be a challenge for sure, a little bit of Darwinism," Lapham said. "(Bengals coach) Forrest (Gregg) said it’s going to be like going to the dentist. You don’t want to do it, but you’ve got to do it. Don’t think about how cold it is, how bad it is. You’ve got a job to do."

The NFL considered postponing or moving the game, said Art Demmas, the umpire that day.

Demmas said the league consulted with an expert on cold weather, who assured them the game could be played safely if players and officials wore proper clothes and had heaters on the benches.

The officiating crew cut holes in polyethylene laundry bags and used them as an extra layer of clothing. Demmas wore two pairs of socks with baggies between them. It didn’t help much.

"At the end of the first half, I didn’t have any feeling in my right foot," he said.

Many of the players, including Breech, wore pantyhose underneath their uniforms.

Bengals offensive linemen provided the most famous fashion statement. They wore their customary shortsleeve jerseys with only petroleum jelly on their bare arms.

Much has been made of the supposed psychological edge it gave the Bengals.

"When we went out sleeveless, I think that was a shock to them," Lapham said. "They looked at us like we were mentally ill."

Bengals Hall of Fame left tackle Anthony Munoz said the decision was for strategic reasons. The less fabric Chargers defensive linemen could grab, the better.

Psychological edge or not, the Bengals handled the conditions much better. They didn’t commit a turnover until the victory was in hand. Despite kicking a ball that felt like a rock, Breech had field goals of 31 and 38 yards. Quarterback Ken Anderson, who didn’t wear a glove on either hand, played remarkably well. He completed 14 of 22 passes for 161 yards and two touchdowns without an interception and ran for 39 yards.

Fouts, a future Hall of Famer, threw two costly interceptions in the 25 mph gusts.

It wasn’t a lot of fun for either team. Part of football’s challenge is coping with pain. The extreme conditions and the stadium’s artificial turf added to the misery.

"If you ever watch a cartoon and the two cartoon characters hit each other on a very cold day and they start to crack from head to toe, that’s kind of what it felt like the first time we ran into a defensive lineman," Munoz said. "Not only the cold weather, but when you take into consideration how hard the turf was. It wasn’t the best turf. It was like playing on I-71."