My Giants

By Adam Cancryn

On the New York Giants, the Super Bowl and describing the indescribable.

When you're obsessed with sports for the better part of 24 years, you figure that, at some point, you've reached the limits of your emotional spectrum. Maybe you haven't seen every shade of agony and ecstasy, but the end points are well defined. The boundaries only extend so far.

My spectrum has always been relatively narrow. I distinctly remember the few times I hit rock bottom, and the even fewer times I bumped up against my emotional ceiling are similarly vivid. Mainly, though, I've occupied a midpoint awash with mixed emotions: various parts hopefulness, excitement and nervousness, with some amount of pessimism and despair thrown in as the situation warrants.

Oh, and terror. Underlying that entire range, from top to bottom, is dizzying, white-knuckle-cold-sweat terror.

That terror is borne of a sporting career full of defeat just as victory seemed certain. There was the high school soccer playoff game, where a freak 40-yard clearing kick arced over our out-of-position goaltender, turning a 2-1 advantage into a tie game just seconds before the final horn. We would lose in overtime minutes later. There was the summer league baseball game where, leading by eight runs, our pitchers were ordered to throw only fastballs. Four innings and nine runs later, we trudged home in defeat.  There was the swim meet, lost by just a few points because of a random disqualification in one of the early events. There were the oh-so-many games we should've won but didn't, would've won if not for this, that or the other. Left with nothing to do but shake your head, chuckle quietly and remind yourself that victory is never certain.

That I've experienced my share of losses isn't unusual, and most people could make similar claims. But those losses have nevertheless defined my view of sports. The shocking disappointments have stuck with me far longer than the surprising upsets. The anything-can-happen attitude has long been replaced by the anything-bad-will-happen perspective.

It's less a persecution complex or a paranoia than a quiet, defeatist confidence. Not that I'm sure which one is worse.

And so it was that terror that gripped me harder than normal during the fourth quarter on Sunday, as the Giants battled the Patriots. I'd returned to my college fraternity to be among my fellow Giants fans, but in this case "among" is not quite accurate. While they cheered and high-fived and drank, I clung to the arms of the couch, stock-still and sober (or as sober as you can ever be in a frat house).

I'd sat in roughly the same spot four years earlier, when the Giants faced the Patriots in the Super Bowl for the first time. But it was different then. They had no chance against the undefeated Patriots, the team loved by its fans and derided by everyone else for its cocksure attitude and penchant for running up the score, a practice we'd dubbed the F-You Touchdown.

Then, the chief emotion had been disbelief. Disbelief that the Giants were somehow still in this, then disbelief that they had a shot to win and finally disbelief that they'd somehow pulled it off. I'd done disbelief before. When you habitually play for bad teams and root for even worse ones (Mets, Knicks, Rangers), every once in a while you're going to pull the upset. There's not much terror associated with trying to accomplish the patently absurd.

This, though. This was different. For two months, the Giants did no wrong. Everything worked in their favor, and culminated in the second Super Bowl appearance in four years. They came into the game favored, if not by Vegas, then by the rest of the country. Everything pointed toward a Giants win.

But this is where sports tends to turn the tables. From Matt Christopher's stock characters on up to the likes of the Red Sox and Cubs, it's this moment where karma runs out, where the little guy rises up against Goliath, where we're reminded that victory is never certain. And so I sat through the fourth quarter, waiting for the moment that would throw us all for a collective loop.

Even now, my few distinct memories of the final minutes are couched in terror. When Brady spun away from the rush and heaved it downfield, I had visions of a bizarro David Tyree-like catch. Eli's sideline floater to Mario Manningham looked sure to drift far out of bounds. Bradshaw's uncontested touchdown played right into Belichick's master plan. The final Hail Mary would certainly be tipped into Gronkowski's waiting arms.

In those moments, failure had a familiar allure. I could handle it, I knew. Curse a little, shake your head, say something disparaging about the other team to make yourself feel better, go home and go to sleep. Life goes on.

But none of that happened. Brady's heave turned into an interception. Manningham got both feet in bounds. Bradshaw provided the winning margin. The Hail Mary fell harmlessly to the ground. Time expired. There was no way to blow it. The Giants, the team that I wanted to win(!), had won.

We sprayed beer all over the room and jumped around and hugged and yelled and chugged champagne from the bottle. I made a bunch of phone calls, but likely said nothing of substance. I wandered around in a daze. I was physically shaking, with something. Excitement, maybe. Adrenaline too, probably.

Prior to Sunday, I'd been sure I knew the spectrum of my sports-associated emotions. High to low, that was it. But that night was an outlier, some random point far to the left of a well-worn trend line. To describe it is near impossible. There was no doubt, no terror, just sheer bliss. I imagine it's what Yankee fans, or Laker fans, or Patriots fans, have felt during the good years, the dynasty years. The Giants are far from a dynasty, but they're the closest I've ever gotten. And even if they never return to the Super Bowl again, I can say that this win was no fluke, and it was no upset. The Giants, my team(!), were simply the best team.

Adam Cancryn is an editor and co-founder of Began in '96.