I’ve been faced with something of a conundrum over the past few years.  Anyone who knows me knows how loyal I am to the teams with whom I place my rooting allegiance.  It is my place in the fandom of New York Giants football that has been the source of that conundrum.

You see, while I love my Giants and always have, over the last few years I’ve found that I just didn’t like them very much.  Too much talk and too many excuses from a team that always seemed to come up small at the worst possible moments.  What was worse was alot of the talk came from players who acted as if they had won that Super Bowl against Baltimore some 7 years ago instead of having gotten blown out by one of the greatest defenses ever and a quarterback many don’t remember.  I can handle a team that isn’t very good but plays their hardest every game.  I can’t handle a team that is pretty good but acts as if they’re much better than their record indicates.

Two blowout losses into the season with a third loss seemingly in progress against the Redskins had me wondering whether this was the year the doors finally came off and the whole roster was to be torn apart and rebuilt.  Then the worm started to turn.  The Giants made a comeback on the scoreboard and a goal line stand for the ages on the field to win that game.

Five more wins would follow yet all there was to be heard was how they had beaten nobody of consequence.  I tried not to be discouraged, telling myself that the important thing is they had beaten the teams they truly should beat.   The would progress in up and down fashion, losing some games in ugly fashion, winning some in even uglier fashion.   But they would never quite get that one signature win to signal something truly special about this season.  I would take solace in the fact that they were at the very least giving their all and keeping quiet about it.  This was proving to be a gritty, resilient team, one that I could embrace without qualms despite the flaws in their play.

It is rather strange that the signature moment of the season who’s end has yet to be written came in a loss.  Yet it is undeniable that this Giants team, this flawed, maligned, written-off Giants team, turned a corner in that 38-35 loss to the undefeated Patriots.  They had played with the best for 60 minutes.  They left it all out on the field and pushed what may be the greatest team of all time to its very limits.

What was even better was the fact that they weren’t satisfied, a fault to which they had succumbed to all too many times in the past.

They would open the playoffs with a convincing win on the road over playoff nemesis Jeff Garcia and the Buccaneers.  The pundits would predict against them almost to a man.  They would follow up with a win for the ages in Giants lore on the road against those most hated Cowboys.  The pundits would predict against them almost to a man.

Finally came yesterday and a date with the Packers on that most hallowed of football grounds, the mecca known as (Curly) Lambeau Field.  In game conditions better suited for penguins and polar bears than for human beings, the Giants would have to go against every football ghost of past and present, Mother Nature, and arguably the greatest quarterback of all time.

What was truly scary was that one of the pundits, a man who actually knows something about winning championship, would pick them in the pre-game.  Welcome to the believers, Mr. Bradshaw.  One can only be left to wonder if that’s why he was the one who got to do the postgame interviews from the relative warmth of the Giants locker room.

The game would be closely contested.  Neither side being able to get further than 6 point ahead of the other.  But as the game wore on, a strange realization started dawn on me and I’m sure a few other Giants fan.  Those gritty, gutty, resilient, us-against-the-world Giants were outplaying the Packers.  Were it not for a slip by Corey Webster on the frozen Lambeau turf leading to a 90 yard touchdown pass, the score would probably have more accurately have reflected the play on the field.

The other thing that was becoming very apparent is that the game would probably turn on whoever made the last big mistake.  As the game wore on in miserable temperature conditions, play became a bit sloppier.  Players numb with cold enhanced by fatigue were having issues holding on to the ball.  Strangely, the two people who seemed to be affected the least were the two who should probably have felt the conditions the most.  Brett Favre and Eli Manning would go toe-to-toe chucking the ball around with authority, sometimes getting little help from those assigned to catch those balls.  Brett would end up with 2 touchdown passes while the Giants touchdowns would come from the run. Beyond that, Eli’s numbers would look better given the fact that their passing yards were similar and 90 of Favre’s yardage would come on one play.

Then there would be the most important stat of all, that aforementioned last big mistake.  Eli had played so well, so amazingly well, for 4 games in a row against the best the opposition had to offer that it would have been heartbreaking if he had made that one mistake.  Thankfully that mistake was not his to make.

Favre, as great a quarterback as he is and has been, has lost a few games outright over the last few years with his gunslinger mentality.  One of the reasons the Packers had done so well so far this year was Favre having played more under control, trusting in the players around him to do their part instead of putting it all on his shoulders.  On this day, the Giants would do their level best to take all his support away from him.  Ryan Grant, a Giant for seemingly all five minutes before traded to the Packers before the season for a 6th round draft pick, would be shut down.  He would rush for over 200 yards last week against Seattle.  He wouldn’t even get to 30 yards against the Giants.  Unlike the Cowboys, the Packers didn’t even have a second option.

To get to the promised land, gunslinger Brett would have to emerge in the final minutes.  Two misses by Giant’s field goal kicker Lawrence “Master of Self-Confidence After the Fact” Tynes and a coin toss would put the game in Favre’s hands in overtime.  And finally that last big mistake would come.  Favre would underthrow a ball meant to be more to the outside than it was.  Corey Webster would get sweet redemption after having slipped on the surface on Donald Driver’s 90 yard TD by jumping in front of the receiver and intercepting the ball making sure to hold on to it all the way to the ground.

Eli would get the Giants close enough for Tynes to get his third shot at it.  Finally figuring out which way the Lambeau winds were blowing, Tynes would put it through the uprights and the Giants were NFC Champions.  And on a cold, blustery night in Northern NJ, watching from the warmth of a local watering hole, as my team overcame the last obstacle in their path to a Super Bowl berth on that frozen tundra, I realized I could truly like as well as love my Giants again.

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