Tony Verna is photographed through one of the 3 Emmy awards he has won

LOS ANGELES — It was the fourth quarter. Navy was beating Army, 21-7, on a grim, early December day in Philadelphia.

“You’re going to do what?” announcer Lindsey Nelson asked between commercials of the college football game.

What CBS director Tony Verna wanted to do was revolutionary — use a tape machine to replay a key touchdown by Army quarterback Rollie Stichweh.

“This is not live!” Nelson would tell a nationwide audience after the commercial break. “Ladies and gentlemen, Army did not score again.”

It was the moment instant replay was born in 1963, a television milestone that would forever change the way viewers watched sports.

Verna, the visionary behind the pioneering achievement and an Emmy-winning director of five Super Bowls and 12 Kentucky Derby telecasts, died Sunday at his home in Palm Desert, Calif., after a short battle with acute leukemia. He was 81.

Entertainment Weekly has listed instant replay’s debut among its 100 greatest television moments. In 2004, Sports Illustrated cited instant replay as one of sports’ “20 great tipping points” of the previous 50 years and wrote of instant replay’s impact, “The revolutionary premise was that sports could be improved not by changing the games but by changing the way they were packaged.”