For a few years, he had been holding onto a tape of Gayle Sierens, a sportscaster turned news anchor at a Tampa television station. She had a husky voice (as a child, she was called Froggy), a love of football and experience calling soccer and equestrian events on TV and radio.

“I can’t let this fail,” Weisman said he told her. “I’ll assign you to Marty Glickman and you’ll do a bunch of practice games first.” At the time, Glickman, a former Olympic sprinter and renowned sportscaster, was coaching NBC’s on-air talent.

Sierens went to Kansas City, Mo., to call a Seahawks-Chiefs game, alongside the analyst Dave Rowe, on the final Sunday of the 1987 regular season.

On the pregame show, Bob Costas asked her about critics’ assertions that her hiring was a publicity stunt. “It will be proved a gimmick if I come out and fail terribly today,” she said. “We hope to walk away from this saying this was a sincere effort to get more women involved in sportscasting.”

As she worked the game, she said she worried that she was not projecting enough energy and feared she was speaking in monotone. She recalled misidentifying the return man on the opening kickoff. “Oh, jeez,” she remembered thinking, “let the barroom conversations begin: ‘She doesn’t know what she’s doing.’ ” But she received generally good reviews.

Sierens, 54, never called another game even though Weisman offered her six more game opportunities for the next season. And in the ensuing 22 seasons, a woman has not called a single National Football League game.

“I used to say that I kicked down the door, but no one else came in,” Sierens said by telephone last week. “But I think that day is nearing. I really do.”

She said the management at her local NBC station did not want her to call any more games the next season. They made it clear that she had a choice: work for NBC, essentially part time, or continue as a full-time news anchor. Her boss did not even want her one N.F.L. game for NBC to be shown in Tampa. “Had the offer to call more games come two years before, it would have been different,” she said. But the opportunity did not arrive until after she was married, pregnant and happy about having made the move into news. “They weren’t trying to keep me from my dreams,” she said. “I tell people that everything in life is timing.”

One of the area’s most prominent and enduring news anchors, Sierens, 54, is still at WFLA-TV in Tampa. Super Bowl XLIII’s arrival in the city means she will co-anchor her usual news shows at 5, 6 and 11 p.m. from a set built at the N.F.L. Experience, the league’s interactive fun zone that is adjacent to Raymond James Stadium. Weisman will be there, too, overseeing NBC’s pregame programming.

That Sierens is the only woman to have called an N.F.L. game is not surprising. Calling games continues to be predominantly male at the high school and college levels, especially in football, and as a result, few women get the opportunity to develop for the precious jobs in the pros.

In some college sports, women have broken through. Doris Burke and Beth Mowins of ESPN, Leandra Reilly of Comcast and Leah Secondo at the Big Ten Network call college basketball games. So has Michele Tafoya at ESPN. Many other women are in the more traditional role of analysts.

Pam Ward of ESPN, is a rarity, now in her seventh season of calling college football. Suzyn Waldman, the radio voice of the Yankees, is unique in baseball.

The most prominent female sportscaster is Mary Carillo: a tennis commentator, an Olympic host and reporter, a correspondent for HBO’s “Real Sports” and a documentary writer for HBO. She called Wimbledon tennis at HBO but is best known as an analyst, working with Dick Enberg and other male play-by-play announcers.

“The tapes I get are for women looking for studio and sideline roles,” said Laurie Orlando, ESPN’s senior vice president for talent development and planning. “Our goal is to get the same kind of acceptance for women doing play-by-play.” She added: “I can’t say I’m surprised that no one has followed Gayle. It’s about time and acceptance.”

NBC’s Andrea Kremer nearly succeeded Sierens. After Sierens decided to continue as a newscaster, Weisman looked to Kremer, then a producer and host at NFL Films.

“I knew football, but I’d never done play-by-play,” said Kremer, who remembered her elation at watching Sierens and her prayer that she not fail. Like Sierens, she was tutored by Glickman, and did only one practice game, in early 1989, with Dave Jennings.

“I went by Marty’s credo: just keep it simple, down and distance, set your analyst up, don’t lose track of the time,” she said. “Once you do it, you don’t realize how energizing it is. Once I did it, and got Marty’s feedback, it seemed a viable job.”

Weisman offered her a deal to call six games in the 1989 season.

But then Weisman was fired by the new president of NBC Sports, Dick Ebersol, killing the deal. (Ebersol rehired Weisman, several years ago, for various assignments.)

“I wondered, Did they fire the guy because he hired me?” Sierens said, poking fun at herself.

Kremer, a longtime sideline reporter for ESPN and now for NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” and HBO, never sought a football play-by-play job again. She doesn’t have to think long about why no network has hired a woman for that position.

“Where are they breaking in at the grass-roots level?” she said. “That’s what you need to put a woman in the position to do the job. Why doesn’t Pam Ward get the opportunity to call an N.F.L. game? She’s paid her dues and learned her craft.”

Reilly was Sierens’s competitor in 1987 for the N.F.L. job; she also worked with Glickman and called a practice game. But, she said, “I was never really in the hunt.”

She called football play-by-play “a pretty elite club,” and said there were fewer barriers in college basketball. “It’s not such a huge steppingstone: women play basketball,” she said. “So, segueing to calling women’s or men’s basketball isn’t a big stretch. But if you don’t see someone who looks like you doing it, you don’t see it as a career opportunity.”

Reilly broke a barrier a few months after Sierens: on Valentine’s Day in 1988 she called a Nets-Sixers game, the first woman to do play-by-play in the N.B.A.

“Charles Barkley fouled out and we had a crooked backboard,” she said of the first of two Nets games she called as a substitute for Steve Albert.

A few years ago, Reilly said friends called to tell her that she, Sierens, Phyllis George and Jane Chastain were the multiple choices to a question on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire”: Who was the first woman to call an N.F.L. game?

Sierens, the correct answer, does not seem to regret doing just that one game.

“My dreams said I wanted to do more,” she said, “but my reality was, how can I go back? I had a salary at my station and would have been low man on the totem pole at NBC. And I could have done those six games and that would have been it.”

If she watches football these days, it’s usually college games.

Her son, Luke, is a defensive back at Elon University.