Super Bowl XLII

You can’t make this stuff up. David slew Goliath, Cinderella went to the ball, light overcame darkness and virtue went to the mountaintop. The Perfect Season turned out to be not so perfect and all of us who lacked faith got shown up big time.

The Giants upset the Patriots 17-14. The phrase melts in your mouth like honey doesn’t it? If you had told me that the score at halftime was going to be 7-3, I would have said that you were out of your mind or just didn’t understand football. I would have told you the same thing if you had said the Giants would score only 17 points and win.

On the other hand, if you had offered me 14-10 Patriots with 2:39 left in the game and the Giants first and ten on their own 17 yard line, I would have taken it in a heartbeat. When you’re playing a team with the kind of talent the Pats have, all you can hope for is to be close at the end of the game and your guys have the ball.

That brings us to the final drive. It was one of those drives that make fans on the other side of the ball howl in frustration. It should have been stopped, it could have been stopped, but it wasn’t stopped. First Jacobs converts on 4th and one, then Samuels misses a chance at a game ending interception, then comes the miracle play with Eli somehow escaping the grip of the Patriots pass rush and heaving a hanger in the general direction of David Tyree. Exactly how Tyree caught that ball up against his helmet while falling to the ground should keep physicists busy for the next century or two. I’m certain several natural laws were fractured if not outright broken.

Then it was Steve Smith scooping in a 3rd and 11 pass from Eli and, knowing precisely where he needed to get for the first down, diving across the marker and out of bounds. And then, oh and then, it was the crowning glory, Eli to Plaxico on a slant and go pattern that left a badly beaten Ellis Hobbs wondering where everyone disappeared to.

All I could say at that point was “omigod, 35 seconds.” Tom Terrific had 35 seconds and three timeouts plus we had to cover the kickoff, something that hadn’t gone all that well in the first quarter.

This time however the Pats could only manage a return to the 25 yard line. Brady’s first pass fell incomplete and then, and then, wonder of wonders, the Giants’ 5th sack of the evening pushed the Pats back, took time off the clock and forced them to burn a timeout. All that was left was time for two desperation Hail Mary passes, both of which were scary as hell, especially the first one which could very well have been a TD to Moss if Brady could have gotten a little more on it, but the football gods had other ideas and both were swatted away harmlessly by Giant defenders.

Wow! Apparently this was the most watched Super Bowl ever with 107 million people watching the shootout in the 4th Quarter.

Now I have to listen to all the so-called experts analyze the thing to death. Let me tell you what I think.

I think that if the 2007 Pats aren’t the best NFL team of all time, they’re up there in the top five. One loss does not make them into a mediocre team. Personally I think they would have been better off losing to the Giants at the Meadowlands in game 16. I suspect that the pressure of being 18-0, going for 19-0, had almost as much to do with the loss as the pressure from the Giants’ pass rush. No one else can know how it felt because no one else has ever been in that position. I saw it in the Patriot defenders eyes on that last drive. You know they were thinking “Oh no, this can’t happen to us. We can’t go undefeated all season and then lose the Super Bowl.”

I also think Brady was hurting. He’ll never admit it, but he didn’t look like the Brady I saw at the Meadowlands.

Of course none of this takes anything away from my Giants and all the superlatives do apply simply because the stakes have never been this high before. This was the greatest Super Bowl game, this was the greatest Super Bowl upset, Eli to Tyree was the greatest Super Bowl play and the Giants’ winning drive was the greatest Super Bowl drive.

But do you know what the really good news is? Someday all of these “greatests” will be surpassed.