They were a perfect karmic match, the thousand-to-one-shot player and the hundred-to-one-shot team. Victor Cruz was only one of 53 men who helped deliver destiny to New York City last winter, but so many of Cruz’ most endearing traits – his toughness, his resilience, his stubbornness and, not least, his talent – were very much of the character of the Giants as a whole, too.
Fitting, then, that on a night when the Giants were handed, in their coach’s words, “a bite of humble pie,” so, too, was Cruz, who a year ago couldn’t trip over a crack in the sidewalk without landing on a $50 bill.
“Tough night all around,” Cruz said. “Tough for me. Tough for the team. Tough for everybody. Not the kind of start any of us had in mind.”
Cruz wasn’t the only concern on this night, of course, a night when the much-bedraggled Cowboys walked into MetLife Stadium and slapped around the defending champs, 24-17. But he and his team were so interwoven last year, the individual success such a splendid result of the team success and vice versa, it was hard not to notice that a little of the new quickly rubbed off of both.
Cruz had three dropped balls and two penalties, and as if that wasn’t bad enough the referees ignored Dallas’ Orlando Scandrick mugging him on a ball in the end zone with 9 ½ minutes left in the second quarter, a no-call that cost the Giants first-and-goal at the 1 and forced them to kick a field goal.
Really, though, that was a microcosm of the Giants’ night, of this first chapter in defense of their title. Cruz had concentration lapses? So did the offensive line. So did the pass rush. So did the defense as a whole, which let Tony Romo slice them up for 307 yards through the air and let DeMarco Murray dice them for 131 yards on the ground.
And, yes: the replacement referees didn’t help. There was the Cruz mutilation. There were a few spotty spots of the ball. There were at least a half-dozen missed holding calls, one of the reasons why the Giants’ vaunted front looked so pedestrian.
To their credit, the Giants refused to use that as either a salve or an excuse – “Everybody works hard at their job,” Coughlin said, absolving the scabs – although that provided little comfort for anyone at the end of a long, bitter night.
“They beat us, and you have to credit them for that,” Jason Pierre-Paul said, “but I really would have liked to see what would have happened if we had played better.”
They will get their chance. If the Giants have taught us anything across the past five years it is just how long the football season can be. They started 0-1 last year too, remember, losing a grisly game to the Redskins in Week One. They were, quite famously, 7-7 after Week 15. We remember the season fondly because of how it ended, amnesia wiping clean the weeks when everyone – Cruz, Eli Manning, JPP, everyone – played poorly.
And if anything, this was a useful reminder that football seasons are like life: once they’re over, you can’t take anything with you.
Or, as Coughlin put it, rather elegantly: “There won’t be any more blowing smoke up their rear ends.”
No. There won’t. It was good that the pregame festivities featured stars of the Giants’ other three Super Bowl titlists, Phil Simms and Ottis Anderson and Michael Strahan representing past generations of Giants glories, because despite the fact that the 2012 Giants were given the honor of repping the 2011 team, that ’11 team, officially, belongs to the history books now, alongside 1987 and 1956 and 1934.
“Last year belongs to last year,” Coughlin said. “Every year is a different year. Every team is a different team.”
The smoke-blowing ends. The wood-chopping starts. At their heart, the ’11 Giants profiled as gritty grinders, in the same manner as their breakout star, Cruz. Cruz had a tough night, they all did, and not for the first time. Plenty of ballgame left. Plenty of season. For most teams, the prospect of a long season can sound like a death sentence.
For the Giants of recent vintage, it’s almost a sacrament. Good thing.