At the finish, as Alan Ameche plowed in for the winning score, Kreisel joined the mob that scrambled onto the field. The goal post nearest him was down when he got there.
This is what he saw: "A guy laying there with one of the beams on his arm. He was screaming, but no one was listening because there were maybe 100 people on top of him trying to break the timber apart."
Kreisel scaled the pile - "I must have been 6 feet off the ground" - and managed to grab a few splinters, which he stuffed in his blue-and-white Hopkins jacket. Then he slid off, pocketed a chunk of sod and headed toward the Colts' locker room.
"We waited [for the players] for an hour, but we got to meet a lot of the guys and shake their hands," he said.
The game touched Kreisel to the core. Back home, he took one of those slivers, had it laminated and affixed it to his key chain. Two years later, he got married - on a Sunday in November when the Colts didn't play. In 1966, when his son was born, Kreisel named him Raymond, after the team's star receiver, Raymond Berry.
Half a century after the Colts' first championship, Kreisel still tingles when he rattles the wood chips in his magic bottle, his favorite gift of 1958.
"Christmas was a side effect," he said. "The game was everything that year."
