If you spend enough time invested in sports — in its daily statistical barrage, in the emotional ransom it demands 500 times a year, in the way it turns bad mornings into pleasant afternoons, good nights into sleepless ones — and if you happen to care most about the teams that hang their shingles in New York, then 2012 was perfect. It had everything for you.
It had a local champion, the Giants, who weren’t only the last men standing at the end of Super Bowl XLVI, but gallant and glorious in pursuing that championship. It is one thing to win a title at the end of a long season of triumph, but something else altogether to make that charge from the middle of nowhere. And for the Giants, sitting 7-7 after 14 games, they were the capital of the middle of nowhere.
It had a local calamity in the other football team in town (which has never seemed more like “the other team in town”), the Jets making headines and crafting back pages by the dozen. It says something about just what a tumultuous year it has been for the green that they were awful, woeful, dreadful, miserable playing football this year — and that was almost beside the point. It may well be that 2012 wasn’t really clamoring for the Jets to help counterbalance all the positive vibes at the end of the year that the Giants had created at the start, but they were nice enough to do so anyway.
That was the yin and the yang, the alpha and the omega of our year, and we’ll get back to them in a bit. But 2012 will probably best be remembered by the smaller events, some of which shone as bright as the North Star in their brief lifetimes, some which will be remembered in years to come as mere footnotes but were, in the moment, precisely the kinds of fleeting gifts that sports tends to specialize in.
We should start on the night of June 1, a night which, for me, began with a series of text messages from a dozen of my closest friends.
“Well,” was the tone of each one, “are you in your car yet?”
Background: I’ve attended close to a thousand baseball games in my life. I’d never once seen a no-hitter in person. It was a small obsession that had become a larger one, and a few dozen times I’ve made the mid-game mad dash toward one of our baseball stadiums to try to get there. In fact, on Easter Sunday, I’d made the ill-fated choice to abandon a wildly entertaining Knicks-Bulls game at the Garden because Jon Niese had no-hit the Braves for five innings; inevitably Niese lost the no-hitter while I was on the approach to the Triboro, and I lost the ability to watch the Knicks’ thrilling win in OT because traffic back into Manhattan was at a standstill.
So on June 1, I indeed dragged myself into my car, hit the Garden State Parkway, ambled toward the GW, made it to Citi Field, dodged a car while trying to Tweet and run toward the front door. And made it with an inning to spare, made it in time to watch Johan Santana throw strike three past David Freese, made it in time to watch history, to listen to generations of Mets fans exhale, and celebrate, and cheer, and cry. Their quest — to live long enough to see the first-ever Mets no-hitter — mirrored my own. It was a privilege to be there that night.
In the same way, it had been a treat a few months earlier to engage in the two-week carnival that became known as “Linsanity,” that started the night before the Giants beat the Pats when Jeremy Lin was summoned to the Garden floor, virtually beat the Nets by himself, and was off on a technicolor dream ride that few players ever get to enjoy.
And we all went along for the ride, all of us who still believe in the power basketball commands in this city. The energy at the Garden was palpable and it was easy to get caught up in it; one night, after one especially Lingenius sequence, I found myself exchanging a high-five with a press-box neighbor, a journalistic felony that somehow didn’t seem terribly wrong in the moment. Later, when the whole phenomenon hit its peak in Toronto, Lin making a game-winning 3, I found myself all but tackling our own Marc Berman on the way to the postgame news conference, screaming, “How do you write it?” and him screaming in response: “How don’t you write it?”
Small moments, stolen moments. Like Raul Ibanez, becoming a bigger enemy to deadline writers than midnight itself, five times launching baseballs into the night sky over the season’s last couple of weeks that seemed like they might alter the course of the Yankees’ season all by themselves. Like the first game the Knicks and Nets played at Barclays Center, an overtime affair that provided a glimpse of just how wonderful life in this city can be as a two-team town.
In these awful days of NHL uncertainty, it is good to remember the run the Rangers took us all on last spring, even hockey novices like me, the seven-game survival tests against the Caps and the Senators, the Hudson River rematch against the Devils. We forget that one of the great things about sports is when they grow bigger than the die-hards, when the casual observers join in, that’s when it can be even more fun than usual.
I am reminded of Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals at the Garden, when the great Larry Brooks bounded up to my seat in the third period and very graciously said, “If you want, you can do the McDonagh column!”
My gratitude turned to confusion when it occurred to me: Ryan McDonagh hadn’t scored, hadn’t assisted, hadn’t gotten into a fight. I was about to ask my seat neighbor — who happened to be Lou Lamoriello — “What did McDonagh do to you that I should be celebrating in a column?” when rookie Chris Kreider scored a goal and allowed me to write his unlikely story and wait for the postgame for Brooks to kindly recount the heroic dash McDonagh had made earlier in the game to prevent an ice-breaking goal.
That time, the novice was spared. But also charmed.
Of course, for all the small ornaments that make our annual sporting tree seem so full, so complete, the whole point of caring so much is for the big payoff, for the moment when all of this seems to happen for a reason. The Giants gave us that this year. And yet even that was a high that was built by the brick and mortar of dozens of smaller moments, all of them adding up to magic.
You start with the Victor Cruz Play, of course, the 99-yard scoring play that, technically, happened on Dec. 24, 2011 but helped make all the beauty of 2012 happen for the Giants — while simultaneously ushering in a year of unrelenting darkness for the Jets. That play helped catapult the Giants to the playoffs, helped bury the Jets under the first shovels of dirt under which so much of their swagger now lies.
For the Jets, the string of bloopers starts there — Darrelle Revis crumbling in agony, Santonio Holmes doing the same only adding the comic relief of tossing the ball to a San Francisco 49er, the butt fumble, the flurry of mistakes by the quarterback, the coach, the GM. And for the Giants, an uninterrupted highlight reel begins at that moment, too:
Three fourth-down stands against the Falcons … Eli Manning’s Hail Mary toss to Hakeem Nicks just before halftime in Green Bay … Kyle Williams’ overtime fumble in the muck and the mud of Candlestick Park … Chase Blackburn’s interception of Tom Brady, weeks after he’d been preparing for life as a middle-school algebra teacher … Wes Welker dropping a sure first-down ball … Eli somehow finding the sliver of daylight into which to drop a dazzling rainbow to Mario Manningham, and Manningham somehow keeping his feet in bounds …
And then, of course, the whole city holding its breath as it waited for Brady’s last prayer to finally fall out of the sky and hit the Indianapolis earth. “That moment,” Tom Coughlin said afterward, “seemed frozen in time forever.”
We know what he means. We had that a lot in 2012.
Vaccaro’s heroes:
TEAM OF THE YEAR
Forget the struggles that have plagued the Giants this year; their victory over the Patriots in February provided an unlikely sequel to one of the great upsets ever and lit up our town like a permanent Christmas tree.
PLAYER OF THE YEAR
It was clear by this time last year that even LeBron James understood why he engendered so much ill will when he publicly scorned Cleveland for Miami. So he started to earn back his reputation the best way possible: by playing his sport at an impossibly high level. And winning a title.
PERSON OF THE YEAR
It ended badly, the way so many of these things tend to end. But the brief, brilliant stretch of basketball wonder known as “Linsanity” was an important reminder of just how deep the affinity between the Knicks and the city really is. Jeremy Lin is long gone but the love affair has been rekindled, and can be traced directly to the unforgettable two-week stretch when he was king of the sports world.
GAME OF THE YEAR
Rare is karma this stark — or this painful. Twenty-six years after Davey Johnson’s Mets stood one strike away from nauseating defeat in the 1986 World Series, Johnson’s Nationals were one strike away from eliminating the Cardinals in Game 5 of the NL Division Series. And like the ’86 Red Sox, the ’12 Nats learned that the eliminating out is almost always the hardest — and most elusive — one.
PLAY OF THE YEAR
Let’s divide it five ways: the five unforgettable, unbelievable home runs that Raul Ibanez hit in the last month of the Yankees season: one that erased a four-run deficit against Oakland in the 13th inning of one game; one that erased a ninth-inning Red Sox lead the night before the Yanks clinched the AL East; two that tied (and then won) Game 3 of the ALDS against Baltimore; and one that tied Game 1 of the ALCS against the Tigers.
MANAGER/COACH OF THE YEAR
His team didn’t win the Stanley Cup last season, and probably won’t get the chance to take another crack at it this season. And he is quite clearly, nobody’s idea of a media prince. No matter. John Tortorella’s no-nonsense approach has made the Rangers relevant again, and connected with hockey fans who themselves tend to be no-nonsense. If only we could see him weave his skill — and his postgame sneers — again. Soon.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com