Yesterday's Giants' win over the Cowboys was one of the great things that's ever happened to me as a sports fan. My team, the battered, bruised, long-shot underdogs - the "all-Joes" - went on the road and played their hearts out against the team with 12 pro-bowlers. Shortly after Tony Romo's final pass sailed into the waiting arms of R.W. McQuarters, the G-Men had officially turned back their top-seeded and hated 13-3 division rivals, wiping the smile off Romo's face in the process and advancing to the NFC championship game in a hard-fought test of true strength and will. It was something to make a movie out of. I could have just as easily been watching "Any Given Sunday."
It's interesting how the 2007 Giants are everything the 2007 Mets weren't. Where the Mets treated the regular season as a formality and paid for it, the Giants battled back from an 0-2 start to make the playoffs as a wild card. Where the Mets spent most of the season acting like they had too much talent to pay attention, the Giants will send only one player to the pro bowl and have spent most of their season making the most out of the talent they do have. Where the Mets lacked heart, let themselves get thrown at, and got pushed around by umpires, the Giants come out talking trash and have thus far backed it up when its counted most.
Suddenly, Eli Manning isn't throwing stupid interceptions. Instead, he's engineering drives that go 71 yards in under a minute before the half and score ballsy game-tying touchdowns. If you cross Brandon Jacobs, he'll straight up fight you. Well-dressed Amani Toomer is the savvy veteran who will take advantage of sloppy pass defense to turn a 12-yard buttonhook route into a 51 yard game-opening touchdown. Who the hell is Ahmad Bradshaw? And from that first win in Washington all the way through week 19, the Giants' defense keeps playing big in big spots.
As much focus as we die-hard fans put on winning and losing, it's a special thing when your favorite team so far exceeds expectations that you can claim victory after a second-round playoff game and feel like your squad has nothing more to prove. These are the moments that keep us going. When we're reminded every once in a while that good things do occasionally happen in sports, we find a way to get it together when our other favorite team blows a 7 game lead with 17 games to play and misses the playoffs (but that's just a hypothetical, of course).
Whatever happens to the Giants in these next weeks is OK by me. Brett Favre is playing for keeps. I know that the tough task of beating Favre and the Packers, at Lambeau, in January, will only be eclipsed, should we even make it that far, by a tougher match-up in the Super Bowl with either the 18-0 Patriots or the team that will have just knocked off the 17-0 Patriots. Anything else the Giants give me this season is a bonus at this point.
Speaking of tough tasks, imagine getting anyone outside of New York or San Diego to watch a Giants/Chargers Super Bowl...ouch.
See you next week. And Happy New Year, too.
(Pictures courtesy getty images, giants.com)
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