ARLINGTON, Texas — All around Lawrence Tynes fell the sound of triumph, the sweet, ear-splitting percussion of relief. There were 105,121 people crammed inside Jerry Jones’ sparkling new spaceship of a stadium, and they all had watched their Cowboys ram the football down the teeth, throats and gizzards of the Giants.
They had seen Felix Jones dance into the end zone for a 7-yard touchdown, capping a 71-play drive, climaxing a long, loud emotional evening in the Texas heat. And, man, were they happy. Finally the Cowboys led, finally the stars were aligning, and wasn’t that exactly the way this lid-lifter on the prairie was supposed to shake out?
Only Lawrence Tynes, looking up at the scoreboard, wasn’t fazed by the 31 next to the Cowboys and the 30 next to the Giants. He noticed a different number: 3:40. That was how much time remained before the folks shoe-horned into Cowboys Stadium could unleash the party for real. And a thought instantly occurred to Tynes, the Giants’ placekicker.
“They left us too much time,” he said, to no one and to everyone. “They left us way too much time.”
This is what happens when winning becomes habit rather than happenstance, when success is the expectation rather than the exception. This is what it’s been like in Foxborough the past decade, and Pittsburgh since the Ford administration, what it was always like here, too, whenever the Cowboys were assuming their place as America’s Team.
And this is the rarefied air the Giants breathe now, the place where they expect to be. They got the ball back on their own 25-yard line and none of them blinked. They immediately were pushed back 10 yards thanks to a penalty, and you could almost see them chuckle, hear them say: Sure, why not. Let’s amp up the degree of difficulty.
“It isn’t like we haven’t been in this position before,” Tynes said.
“Everyone else said this was Armageddon, that it was the Super Bowl in Week 2,” Antonio Pierce said with a laugh. “To us, it was just a football game, one we still had a chance to win.”
It is easy to fall over yourself and praise Eli Manning, the man who calmly trotted on the field and nudged the Giants 11 plays and 56 yards, who completed seven passes to five different receivers while what seemed and sounded like three-quarters of the Metroplex were shouting and screaming and showering spittle on them, using up 216 of the available 220 seconds.
It is easier to want to marvel at Tynes, the man who knocked the Giants into the Super Bowl two years ago, who’d missed a chip-shot of a field goal in the third quarter that threatened to serve as the worst kind of turning point, and who breezily booted a game-winning 37-yarder with four seconds remaining to give the Giants the 33-31 win . . . and then had to do it all over again after the Cowboys were granted one of those cheesy late timeouts.
But there is a larger truth surrounding this group of Giants now, and a simpler one.
“I think,” Justin Tuck said, “that we’re just a team that knows how to win football games, and isn’t afraid to do the things we need to do to win them.”
So yes: It was Manning who led the climactic drive, and it was Tynes who solidified his reputation as a money kicker. But it was also Kenny Phillips picking off two passes and Bruce Johnson plucking one, the secondary torturing Tony Romo all night. It was the Giants’ no-name receivers who are quickly etching those names in golden plates. It is a team that shrugs off game-ending injuries to key components like Tuck and Domenik Hixon.
It is a team that has winning in its muscle memory now. And it shows.
“I tip my hat to the Giants players,” coach Tom Coughlin said at game’s end, looking genuinely impressed by his own team’s inability to cede anything when a game is there to be won. “This was a great team effort.”
It is supposed to be a cliché, and in many ways it is. But sometimes, clichés speak to larger truths. The fact is, it was a great team effort, delivered by a great team, in the middle of an era of its history when winning has become a basic part of the job description.