It’s hell playing for pride when you’re used to playing for parades. It’s hell to know that you’re a slave to the scoreboard, reliant upon the kindness of strangers, your fate nowhere close to your own hands.
It’s hell to play simply for the love of the game.
“We’re professionals,” Eli Manning said this week. “We know what’s expected of us. We know what we have to do the next few weeks. And that starts with playing like we believe we can win the next five games in a row.”
“You do that,” Antrel Rolle added, “and the season takes care of itself.”
Look, it’s pretty damn good to be a professional athlete, even a football player who limps and staggers for his supper, whose paycheck often seems as if it’s signed for in blood. The hours are good and the compensation fine, and the perks can be something to behold. No one cries for Goliath.
And, look: The Giants got far more season than they had a right to expect when they flew home from Chicago in early October, 0-6 and in utter despair. Part of that was thanks to the largesse of the Cowboys and Eagles, both of whom refused to step on the Giants’ necks. Part of that was the luck of the quarterback draw, four straight games against teams who might have been better off trying the single-wing formation than actually anointing a starting QB.
Whatever. If there were no excuses for 0-6, then there needed to be no apologies for 4-0.
“Say whatever you will about how we got there,” Manning said, “but we put ourselves in position to be playing a big game at home last week, one that could have turned our season completely around.”
That was something.
“We just didn’t win the game,” Manning said, and that was something, too.
So now the Giants are in a helpless position Sunday night, when they match up with 3-8 Washington in a game that had to have NBC executives wondering if they could snatch an old copy of “Supertrain” from the network archive as alternative programming instead.
The Cowboys, from whom they could use help, already have postponed any necessary assistance for another week after beating the Raiders on Thanksgiving. By the time the Giants take the turf at FedEx Field, they already will know if the Eagles have done their part, although the way Philadelphia has played since Nick Foles’ return, that’s hardly a favorable possibility.
“We’re going to play and we’re going to do our best because I don’t think this team knows any other way,” said coach Tom Coughlin, who was displeased at the Giants’ chattiness before the Cowboys game and couldn’t have been pleased with Justin Tuck’s tweeting of his twin Super Bowl rings as a postgame consolation. “We have five games left, and I can promise you we will do our best to win every one.”
It is a testament to what Coughlin has accomplished that the Giants have played exactly one meaningless game since the final game of his first season, 2004 (Eli Manning’s first win as a pro quarterback in the season finale against Dallas). That game was Jan. 3, 2010, the Vikings stomping the Giants 44-7 a week after New York officially had been eliminated from the postseason.
That’s a hell of a run, and one to be proud of — almost 10 full years with only one stakes-free game. And it’s a streak the Giants can keep alive for a few more weeks, at least, a streak that would also keep pressure on the Cowboys and the Eagles, force them to keep winning.
“As long as we win,” Rolle said, “good things can still happen.”
As long as they win — starting tonight, starting with this rivalry game, starting with putting Washington out of its misery once and for good — they’ll play another meaningful game next week, and another the week after that.
It’s hell being irrelevant. It’s on the Giants to keep themselves in the picture as long as possible. They owe themselves that much.