NEW YORK SOFTENS TO A TOUGHER BIG BLUE

Well it’s Friday night now, already less than 48 hours before Super Bowl XLII. There’s a wide eyed excitement in the air about the Giants that I haven’t seen in a very long time. Dare I even undermine my own New Yorkness for a second, and say that I find it quite refreshing to see this town lose its cynicism and view their “underdog” Giants through the same lens as the “Little Engine that Could.” Even the media seems to be taking a bit of small town stance, chatting up Big Blue as if they were some Midwestern high school team en route to the state championship game. Funny how things change. New York fans aren’t known for being fickle; at least not in the way they perceive their team. It’s been nearly 30 years since the infamous fumble by Joe Piscarcik, and that’s still talked about as if it were yesterday. Going into Christmas, you’d be hard pressed to find many Giant fans truly excited about making the playoffs. Even though they got into the post season on their own merit this year, it again felt that they backed their way into the playoffs thanks to the widespread mediocrity in the NFC. After all, they blew their chance to wrap up with an extremely pedestrian home field showing field against the Washington Redskins on December 16th. And while the Giants did have a second chance to “control their destiny” a week later in Buffalo -- a game which they won -- there was something anticlimactic about that victory, as it again reinforced the Giants as that maddeningly bipolar team that only comes up big against the league’s sub-par clubs.

So when the Giants did get into the playoffs this year, there was an uneasy concern, much in the way a despised manager barely meets his corporate objectives; then manages to survive for another year…again. Up to, say, six weeks ago, this was the vast majority’s viewpoint of Tom Coughlin and the Giants. Yes he’s made the playoffs before with the Giants, only to the have their noses rubbed in caca in the most humiliating fashion. Going into Tampa Bay several weeks ago, it looked early on that the Giants might again follow the same script as other recent playoff appearances: get beaten, go home, and then have the front office maintain the status quo a few days later. After all, they were a playoff team...right?

And so with several years of that same repetitive history, not to mention the still lingering bitterness from the Jim Fassel era, how could Gotham’s take on the Giants not be skewed? But alas, the Giants woke up after that anemic first quarter in Tampa, and won. They went to Dallas…and won. They went to frigid Green Bay…and won.

And so after tagging victories in three different cities with three different climates, the mood for Big Blue going into the Super Bowl is quite loose. The same goes for the mood of New York City. Despite the excitement that goes with any New York sports team going into a championship game, there’s a certain “what the hell” feel to this Super Bowl that’s so nice and so uncharacteristic it’s almost a little strange. In recent years when teams like the Yankees got into the post season, one could almost sense an extra tenseness in the air; as it seems to be less about the fun of another World Series these days, as it is the need to stem any potential embarrassment of the world’s richest team failing to live up to snuff. If anyone in New York looked into a crystal ball four months ago and saw it read Big Blue was going to the Super Bowl, they’d likely track down the street vendor who sold that crystal ball and jack him against a wall in Times Square. Now everyone’s giddy about the possibility of what the Giants can do, as if we’re 8 million extras in the five borough version of “Hoosiers”. Cynicism be gone…

That said, should the Giants win the Super Bowl, the celebration might not be quite so innocent. But what’s not to love? It’s been nearly a generation since the Giants brought home the Lombardi trophy. It’s OK to let it rip…
Just not so cynically.