• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, 5 hours ago

This week has been characterized by dozens of TV specials and hundreds of stories on TV news commemorating and mourning the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

It all culminates on Friday with the annual remembrance ceremonies at the three sites of the attacks -- downtown Manhattan, the Pentagon and Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

After that, TV abruptly resumes business as usual, symbolized mainly by the return of TV's most anticipated annual staple -- a full slate of NFL games on Sunday.

As everybody knows by now, this year marks 25 years since the attacks.

Those of us who were alive and old enough to remember that terrible day are thinking: Can it really be 25 years? It seems like only yesterday.

Back then, the days and weeks after the attacks were anything but normal on television. Coverage of the story -- which happened to be the biggest story of many of our lives -- went on for weeks.

It was a story with “legs,” you might say -- a story with so many facets and angles that it took weeks to sort them out.

In the fall of 2001, nothing symbolized TV's return to a kind of normalcy more than the saga of the Emmy Awards.

First scheduled for September 16, two weeks after 9/11, the Emmys were postponed until a future time when it might be more appropriate to mount a frothy televised awards show.

The awards were rescheduled for October 7, but they were postponed just hours before airtime because that was the day the U.S. launched the War in Afghanistan.

The Emmys finally aired on November 4, a seven-week delay. Host Ellen DeGeneres got the ball rolling with a memorable line that set the tone for the evening.

“I feel I'm in a unique position as host,” she said in her opening monologue. “Think about it: What would bug the Taliban more than seeing a gay woman in a suit surrounded by Jews?”

As a matter of fact, that evening was quite a distinguished night of television. In addition to the Emmys on CBS, other prime-time shows and events included the seventh game of the World Series (the Diamondbacks won), the first-season finale of “The Sopranos,” the final chapter of “Band of Brothers” (which premiered eight days after 9/11 on September 9) and a Warsaw ghetto miniseries on NBC.

But all of that was 25 years ago. Today, it is as appropriate to resume business as usual immediately after 9/11 as it was to mourn and remember it in the weeks leading up to it.

In a nutshell, that is America. We are a sentimental people capable of mourning terrible events, and then having fun afterward.

The events of September 11, 2001 produced a united America -- at least for a short time.

May the football season bring us all together this fall, as it always does.