There are thin streams of sunlight peeking through the clouds, so the enormous pile of venetian blinds also known as MetLife Stadium doesn’t look quite as dreary as it could. It is framed this day by piles of snow and scores of workers closing it down the way you would a beach house on Labor Day.
Somehow, the last day of football beat the last day of 2012 by a full 24 hours, and the emptiness echoes all around the parking lots, where the detritus of the final tailgates of the year still lay: crushed beer cans, sacks of unused hamburger rolls, the odd pile of burned-out charcoal.
Around the corner, the Giants are speaking in sober tones of what might have been and what should have been, their lease on the Lombardi Trophy officially expired. Thirty-one miles away the Jets are saying nice things about a general manager whose fate was sealed by their haplessness and their indifference, and on this day it felt like an entire generation ago that they stood on the doorstep of a Super Bowl.
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This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be around here. Nine years have come and gone since the last time the Jets and Giants both missed the playoffs. The Giants went 4-12 in 2003, the Jets 6-10. How long ago was that? Jim Fassel still coached the Blue. And the quarterback for the Green, Chad Pennington, was being favorably compared to Joe Montana … at least until he dislocated his wrist in the preseason.
Between them the near-decade since has yielded four trips to conference title games, two Super Bowls and an awful lot of time pondering football deep into January. Just not this time. Just not this January.
“We should have closed the division out weeks before we got to [Sunday],” Jerry Reese said yesterday. “We don’t get paid to go 9-7. We set the bar high here. We didn’t get the job done.”
Somber day for the Giants general manager. Of course, relatively speaking, it was hard for him to complain too much.
“There are some champions on this team that haven’t been crowned yet,” Mike Tannenbaum said in a statement on his final day as the Jets general manager, parting words that were either a gracious farewell salute to the troops or one final burst of delusion from an organization that seems to specialize in it.
So the Jets enter the offseason mist as they seem to every four or five years, fractured and teetering. The Giants take the same path feeling better about themselves. But it really doesn’t matter — chaotic or calm, 6-10 or 9-7, they are still on the wrong side of the NFL bubble, one of the 20 teams heading home, envious as hell of the 12 still playing.
This would be bad news in any year. It seems especially dreadful when you see MetLife empty and abandoned, 57 weeks before its big day in the sun (or snow or sleet or slush), 57 weeks before the Super Bowl makes its outdoor debut in a cold-weather shrine that would surely welcome a cold-weather participant.
Back in the heady days when the Big Game was first awarded to the strange Jets-Giants alliance, it didn’t seem all that silly to ponder one of the teams breaking a forever taboo and qualifying for a home-game Super Bowl. And in especially fevered moments — hey, what are sports without the occasional hallucination? — it seemed they might be stocked enough to dream of a real New York-New York partnership in the Jersey Meadowlands.
Of course, that was before the Jets started lining their sidewalks with banana peels, back when the Giants still possessed an endless supply of pixie dust. Hell, before the Saints — who seemed plenty good enough to break that jinx in time for this season’s game at the Superdome — were ransacked by Bountygate.
The NFL is a funny league. Today’s vanquished can become tomorrow’s victors with the right hire, the right draft pick, the right hot streak. The Redskins get to live that now, as do the Colts and the others inside the bubble. For everyone else, including the East Rutherford Giants and the Florham Park Jets, the road to New Orleans has been replaced by the 57-week race to MetLife Stadium.
Much earlier than any of them would have wanted.