Look, let’s be blunt about this, OK?
The NFL owed us.
It owed New York. Owed the city — and for the sake of unity, for can’t-we-all-just-get-along, let’s classify “the city” as everything from Long Beach Island to Montauk Point; everything from Stamford to Woodstock and that great urban mass in the middle of it all — for twice helping to make the league what it is in these opening hours of 2014: the gold standard — quite literally — of American sports.
Oh, it’s possible professional football would have gotten there eventually, would have sped by baseball long ago, would have achieved a level of sporting ubiquity surpassed only by the Premiership on the other side of the pond. Because anything possible.
But we don’t have to speculate. We know. We know that the two most important games in league history, the two that helped shape and define the game we know today, were played 10 years and two weeks apart, and that they involved two New York teams (when they actually were based within the city limits), and that one pushed the sport into the national forefront and the other into the stratosphere.
We know that on Dec. 28, 1958, the Colts beat the Giants in sudden-death overtime, 23-17, when Alan “The Horse” Ameche barreled over from the one-yard line, a game so famous it is given credit for inventing three things: 1) the legend of Johnny Unitas; 2) the term “sudden-death overtime;” and 3) the NFL as a national obsession.
We know that on Jan 12, 1969, the Jets beat the Colts, 16-7, when Joe Willie Namath shredded the Colts secondary and Matt Snell rumbled off left tackle and Jim Turner kept kicking field goals, a game that 1) invented the Sports Guarantee; 2) introduced the world to Jimmy the Greek; and 3) not only established the word “Super Bowl,” but established the Super Bowl as the singular event on the American sporting calendar.
(And, yes, we know Baltimore was involved in both. The NFL owes Baltimore plenty, too.)
“I guess we know that they were important because of the way things have turned out,” Don Maynard, who played in both games — for the Giants in ’58, for the Jets in ’69 — said a few years ago. “But I also know this: Those were also two of the best games I ever saw.
“And not just because I played in ’em.”
So, yes, after Sunday night, we can call it even. We can call it square. By the time the Broncos and the Seahawks are done battling each other — and, by all indications, doing so in splendidly temperate conditions — the NFL will have paid off its debt to New York City, and the New York-New Jersey metropolis will have done its part, too: provided a perfect destination for out-of-town fans, offered up a well-thought-out, well-planned football extravaganza (while simultaneously barely batting an eye because, well, that’s how we roll).
One thing’s for certain, though.
The Super Bowl will be better for having given New York and New Jersey a try, for taking the game out of the sunshine, grabbing it from under the comfort of a roof, and putting it in the place where it first reached for the sunlight, where it first understood the true power of its product. And, yes, New York will be better for having had the Big Game, if not in the transformative way a Jacksonville or a Detroit is, then just in the sheer reaffirmation that no town enjoys the biggest stage more than this one does, and nobody utilizes that bully pulpit better.
And even as cool as we try to be …
Even we have to admit: This is pretty cool.
The Super Bowl. Here. In our backyard. After an endless string of Miami and Los Angeles and New Orleans, a thoroughly vanilla thread of Tampa and San Diego and Phoenix, after curious side trips to Dallas and Atlanta and Houston, and inexplicable jaunts to Jacksonville and Detroit and Minneapolis … well, after all of that, the NFL declared: “I know what I’m needing. And I don’t want to waste more time.”
It’s in a New York state of mind. Good for us. Good for the NFL. And now, on with the show.