If you ever talk to CBS Sports reporter Evan Washburn at Eddie’s, sometimes reading a Baltimore magazine issue near the register, you’ll notice he doesn’t use any extraneous words—like, um, or uh—that the rest of typically use to fill the air.

“Word efficiency,” Washburn calls it. “I’ve made a calculated effort in everyday life not to use wasted words.”

It’s practice—for his TV job, one that this Sunday will bring Washburn’s voice and blond-haired likeness into the homes, computers, and phones of the more than 100 million people watching the Super Bowl—the biggest American television event of every year.

As an Annapolis native and Severn High grad who’s lived in Baltimore the last 10 years, Washburn is a sideline reporter for CBS. And, in the second Super Bowl game broadcast appearance of his TV career, he’ll work the New England Patriots beat when they face the Los Angeles Rams in Atlanta.

His job, as it has been working NFL games the last five years, is to deliver news and observations from the field, in short but informative 15 to 35 second bursts, and without getting in the way of the action.

And so, it helps to limit the ums and the likes in practice in a phone conversation with a friend, or with a stranger at the grocery store. It’s preparation for game day, if Tom Brady is injured and the world is curious to know what’s going on with him before play-by-play announcer Jim Nantz and analyst/football sage/former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo call the next play.

“You have to get everything in quickly,” Washburn says. “For the whole game, you’re on the air probably for a grand total of two minutes. And you better get done with whatever you’re saying in a succinct way before they snap that ball, because that’s the time for the play-by-play and sometimes the analyst to talk and set things up.”

A former lacrosse player at the University of Delaware, where he graduated in 2008, and a production assistant and intern with Comcast SportsNet, Washburn started with CBS eight years ago as a college lacrosse TV analyst and has quickly worked his way up the broadcast ladder. He earned a full-time job in 2014 and has since covered college football, March Madness, and NFL games, with a straightforward brand of reporting. He’s also worked locally with the Ravens.

He calls the job a privilege, and if he has any advice for those wanting to be in his position on sports’ grandest stage, it’s “You need to be ready at all times for when the luck happens,” because he was willing and able when the cable CBS Sports Network needed a fill-in analyst for a Princeton-Cornell lacrosse game in Ithaca, New York, (his first job with the company), and later when a college football reporting job opened just weeks before the season in the summer of 2012.

“[CBS] gave me opportunities when my paper resume by no means qualified me for it, which I always appreciated, because they saw something and ran with it,” he says. “Hopefully, up until this point, I haven’t really let them down.”

For the last four years, Washburn worked with CBS’ No. 2 NFL broadcast team and has gotten called up to the top squad each year the network has broadcast the Super Bowl, joining Tracy Wolfson on the sideline this year and in 2016 when the Denver Broncos and Carolina Panthers played in San Francisco.

This time around, as Washburn spoke before heading to Atlanta, he feels a little calmer—and not just because he’s more experienced. You’d think preparing for the greatest professional opportunity of your life in front of the largest television audience possible would be enough for one person to handle, but how about doing it while your newborn and wife rested in a neonatal intensive care unit?

“That was a wild time for me,” Washburn says of three years ago.

Two weeks before Super Bowl 50, Washburn’s wife, Kate, delivered their son, Hudson, a month early, on January 22, 2016, as blizzard hit home — and while Washburn was away in Denver preparing to broadcast the AFC championship game.

He was in a production meeting with Patriots coach Bill Belichick when his wife actually gave birth. Washburn’s phone kept buzzing, but he didn’t want to take it out and interrupt, you know, because he was trying to make a good impression with the coach who’s notoriously publicly curt with reporters.

He finally saw the texts from his dad, with pictures of his son, after the session with Belichick was done. Washburn called his wife, but they only spoke briefly before Brady walked in the conference room for his interview with CBS’ crew. After the game, Washburn flew home from Denver, but was only in Baltimore for four days before heading back across country to be in California for Super Bowl media week.

“My son, he was doing okay, but it was still a stressful, shocking time. It was all kind of a blur,” he says. “This time around, at least leading into the week, is much nicer. I have a lot more mental space to stop and smell the roses.”

Hudson is now 3, the family is settled at a home near Loyola University, and Washburn has several seasons of high-profile NFL coverage behind him. “It’s fun being in this community, and being out there at these big events and coming back to this place,” he says.

He describes the mechanics of his job—the things that are hidden to the TV viewer—as only a veteran could do. The analysts, like Romo, whose play-predicting ability is already becoming legendary, always have their microphones on. (“He couldn’t be a cooler dude,” Washburn says of Romo, with whom he worked for the first time during the Patriots-Kansas City Chiefs game two weeks ago.) Sideline reporters, meanwhile, need to be more proactive to get air time.

“There’s nothing in the broadcast, other than maybe one report before the game starts, that says Evan is going to get on the broadcast,” Washburn says. “You have to earn your way on the air. Everything falls on your shoulders to create your content.”

Oftentimes, those are injury reports from teams (“questionable to return,” and the like), but whether other information has value is left to his discretion.

If he has something to say, or context to add to what’s happening in the game, he’ll tap a button on his microphone to communicate off air with a producer, and when it comes time to report, suddenly Washburn will be speaking or appearing live to millions of people—trying to make his point without any of those wasted words.

“All of us like to voice our opinion on things, but that’s really just not the position,” he says. “Early on [in your career], you’re worried making sure that you’re doing a good job so that you can advance. But once you get comfortable with your status, it’s about the game. The game is going to dictate how much you get on the air, what you do on the air, and how people receive it. It’s always about the game.”

And none are bigger than this one.

Siobhan Hagan digs Elvis and Polaroid photos. She has a metal Scooby-Doo lunch box. She wears 1950s dresses and vintage sweaters, and when the 33-year-old’s grandmother passed away, “I moved everything from her house into mine,” she says with a self-deprecating laugh. The confessed “old stuff nerd” was born in the city and earned a graduate degree in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Her thesis there was built around the archives of WJZ-TV, which proved a fortuitous decision. The station hit the airwaves in 1948, and 70 years is a long time, enough for film to deteriorate and oxide particles to fall off magnetic television tape.

Hagan had grown up watching WJZ—“My mom turned on Rise and Shine every morning, it was my alarm clock as a kid”—and founded the nonprofit Mid-Atlantic Regional Moving Image Archive (MARMIA) two years ago. In the process, she acquired WJZ’s archives, then being stored, but without a plan to preserve the collection, at the University of Baltimore. Hagan is in the process of digitizing as much of the 25,000-piece acquisition as she can before the early footage and videotapes disintegrate.

On a recent night in Hampden, Hagan screened some WJZ throwback tapes as part of a fundraising effort. Highlights included Eyewitness News coverage of Hurricane Agnes in 1972, Richard Sher and Oprah Winfrey hosting People Are Talking, Chuck Thompson recapping the O’s stunning World Series sweep in 1966, irrepressible weatherman Marty Bass ditching his hairpiece, behind-the-scenes clips of The Buddy Deane Show—the inspiration for John Waters’ Hairspray—and Romper Room with Nancy Rogers Claster. Plus, Jerry Turner burying his head into the anchor desk in uncontrollable laughter after a rabbi’s son made funny faces, unbeknownst to his father, to the camera throughout an entire Hanukkah segment.

Beside the time-capsule clips of life in Charm City, which also include WJZ’s disco-era Evening Magazine, is footage from the ’68 riots, investigative pieces on racial issues and public housing, and, of course, coverage of the colorful 44th mayor of Baltimore, one William Donald Schaefer.

“People’s memories are sensitive to time, and these [tapes and films] are, too. They don’t last forever. They’re endangered,” says Rob Schoeberlein, who oversees the cavernous Baltimore City Archives in Better Waverly, which houses MARMIA’s office and the WJZ collection. “Normally, when we think of archiving material, it’s manuscripts, letters, legal documents, and photographs. This is now important material, too.”

Beyond MARMIA’s WJZ-TV collection, the nonprofit gathers other local films, found VHS tapes, recorded sound and mixtapes, and home movies in an effort to document the arts, history, and culture of the Mid-Atlantic region. Hagan will even digitize old wedding films—as long as MARMIA gets to keep a copy.

One couple, in their 80s, Hagan recalls, had never seen their wedding film—shot by the bride’s father and essentially lost for six decades—until their daughter rediscovered it and asked Hagan to digitize it. They all watched it for the first time last fall on a pop-up screen at the City Archives building.

“My parents had been bickering during the ride down. Over what, who knows? Just the way old couples do,” Susan Hebble says. “They were married in 1956, and the reception had been at the Casablanca, a jazz club in Liberty Heights that later became the Sportsman’s Lounge when former Colt Lenny Moore bought it. Zim Zemarel’s swing band played—you could see the name on the drum kit.”

Hebble says her family watched the film again over Christmas, and then again during her mother’s funeral this spring. “My mother had begun having some memory issues by the time we went [to the City Archives], but she had none while looking at their wedding. Everything came back, and she became her normal, bubbly self again. The whole way home, my parents were very romantic toward each other. My dad told my mother he had forgotten how beautiful she was.”