Son Honors the Father He Never Knew, a NY Firefighter Who Died on 9/11

Sept. 8, 2011— -- Pat Lyons wasn't the biggest guy on the New York City Fire Department's team. He wasn't the fastest, but he would not accept defeat. His comebacks as quarterback for The Bravest were the stuff of legend.

That supreme confidence also earned him a spot on Brooklyn's squad 252 -- an elite unit trained to rescue other firefighters.

"The best way I can describe Pat would be, when you see his face coming off the rig, he had his game face on, and that toothpick in his mouth," said Artie Sartor, a fellow firefighter and one of Lyons' good friends. "That would sum it up."

He was a huge Miami Dolphins fan. Lyons was also a prudent soul and for him parenthood took years of planning.

"There was this time when we were dating that we went to, like, a local flea market, and we found these tiny Dolphins socks for a baby, and we bought them," his wife Irene said. "It was just a 'ha-ha', you know? And I tucked them away, and I knew exactly what I would do with those one day."

In the spring of 2001 Lyons was giddy when he and his wife learned they would be having a son -- a little quarterback. A few weeks before Irene's due date, Lyons got a call from the firehouse, asking if he would pull some overtime and work on Sept. 11. He agreed.

On that day, it was a mayday call that sent him scrambling into the North Tower at the World Trade Center -- men were trapped on the 50th floor. Irene was at work at a candy company on Long Island when her brother called to describe the scene in Lower Manhattan.

"All of a sudden he said, 'Oh, my goodness,' and his voice quivering, and he said, 'The tower just fell,'" she recalled. "So that's how I found out the tower fell, and I don't know if it was because I was pregnant, or in shock, but I dropped the phone and I just went hysterical crying."

Sartor was off that day, but he rushed to lower Manhattan as soon as he heard the news, and resolved to help save his friend from beneath the rubble.

"You know, we, everybody, mindset was like this, nobody showed up here in a dump truck, nobody's leaving here in a dump truck," he said.

But after months of searching, Lyons' body was never found and Irene gave birth to a baby boy on October 7, 2001, whom she named Patrick Mate Lyons. Now almost 10 years old, Patrick, say family members, bears an eerie resemblance to his father, right down to the way he throws a football.