SPECIAL MOMENT:Giants coach Tom Coughlin happily hands the Lombardi Trophy to Super Bowl XLVI MVP Eli Manning after Big Blue defeated the Patriots 21-17 last night in Indianapolis. It was the second Super Bowl win for both. (Getty Images)
INDIANAPOLIS — So this was how the football season was going to end, six months after the silly summer game of labor chicken, six weeks after the Giants had looked as dead as dial-up Internet, 90 minutes after it looked as if Tom Brady had stolen a Super Bowl away from them.
This was the last breath of a splendid season, the last thing that 68,658 people inside Lucas Oil Stadium would take away from a terrific Super Bowl XLVI, a football floating high over the turf, slung toward the back of the end zone by Brady, 50 yards away. One play for the championship of the world.
One play for forever.
COMPLETE GIANTS SUPER BOWL COVERAGE
“Please,” coach Tom Coughlin heard himself saying, again and again and again on the sidelines. “Please knock that ball down. Knock it down! Knock it down! Knock it down!”
On the sidelines, helpless to do anything but watch, Giants running back Ahmad Bradshaw heard himself utter pure, unfiltered jibberish as he watched the ball drop out of the sky. Upstairs, in the detached serenity of the owner’s box, Ann Mara, the 82-year-old team matriarch, widow of one Giants owner and mother to another, quietly thumbed rosary beads and wondered if her stomach could handle what she was about to see.
“All year long,” linebacker Michael Boley said, “we have a bunch of guys who keep saying to each other in the hardest parts of games, the fourth quarter, the winning time of games, ‘Hey! Who’s going to make a play!’ Now all we needed was to make one play and we’re champions of the world. One play!”
That they had been able to boil the season to this solitary play, this single ball in flight, was already nothing shy of impossible. They’d been 6-6. They’d been 7-7. No team has ever won a Super Bowl with fewer than 10 wins, and none had ever won after enduring a four-game losing streak, or after allowing 400 points in a season.
Yet here they were.
“We were buried, and maybe we deserved to be buried,” safety Kenny Phillips said, “but we knew if we could get healthy, if we could only get into the playoffs … well, we thought we’d be a hard team to eliminate from the playoffs.”
And here they were, ahead 21-17, ahead after allowing Brady and the Patriots to bracket halftime with bookend touchdowns, falling behind by nine, falling into a familiar Bill Belichick gameplan that was essentially a note-for-note blueprint from the one he’d invented 21 years ago to beat the Bills: dare the Giants to run, hammer receivers at every turn, own the ball, bleed the clock.
Damned if it didn’t nearly work, too. But the Patriots, for all their attention to Belichick’s bible, kept sabotaging themselves. Brady cost them a safety on their first snap of the game. Three times the Giants fumbled; twice they recovered and the one time the Pats fell on it they were flagged for having an extra man on the field.
And late in the fourth quarter Brady delivered a death knell, a laser-beam pass to Wes Welker that would have all but sealed the game. Welker makes that catch snoring at 3 a.m.
Only this time, he dropped the son of a gun.
“Made that play a thousand times,” Welker said. “Didn’t make that one.”
Who’s going to make a play? Mario Manningham would, tip-toeing along the sidelines to set up this year’s answer to the Helmet Play. Eli Manning would, of course, because as Lawrence Tynes would say, “When Ten has the ball, you know good things are going to happen.” Even Bradshaw would, however unwittingly, toppling into the end zone when the desperate Patriots were hoping he would score and leave them time on the clock.
Now they needed one more. A ball was in the air, same as it had been three weeks ago in Green Bay, Hakeem Nicks answering a halftime Hail Mary.
“If I hadn’t seen it was possible,” Manning said, “maybe I’d have felt a little better.”
A mass of arms. A tangle of hands. New England’s Aaron Hernandez lunged. Phillips lined it up.
“Please!” Coughlin yelled, “Wjjsdddgggaa!”
Bradshaw squealed, “Hail Mary, full of grace.” Ann Mara whispered.
The ball fell to the ground.
“History,” Phillips said.
History, indeed. And then some.