OK, I’M hooked. I’m all in.
Rex Ryan is beating Peyton Manning and going to the Super Bowl.
Mark Sanchez is beating Peyton Manning and going to the Super Bowl.
After 41 long years, the Jets are beating the Colts and going to the Super Bowl in Miami.
I don’t know how exactly — beyond turning the game into a back-alley brawl — the throwback Jets will do it. I just know that Ryan and the boys don’t intend on going into Indianapolis Sunday to kiss Manning’s Super Bowl XLI ring.
If Ryan believes the Jets should be favored over Manning and the Colts, who are we to argue now?
SANCHEZ DAD’S WINNING SUPERSTITIONS
‘LUCKY JETS SEEK A LITTLE RESPECT
We ought to call the guy Boastradamus, for crying out loud (or at team meetings).
“You got guys right now who want to run through that brick wall for him,” Marques Douglas said in the buoyant visiting locker room at Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego Sunday after the Jets stunned the Chargers 17-14.
There is more pressure on Manning and the Colts now because of their much-ballyhooed decision to value a Super Bowl championship over a perfect season.
Ryan already has his Jets foaming at the mouth like rabid junkyard dogs, demeaned by the notion that if Manning hadn’t been pulled late in the third quarter of the Jets’ 29-15 Dec. 27 victory for rookie Curtis Painter, they never would have been here to talk about it.
By no means is it a unanimous mantra sweeping through the locker room, but sometimes in sports, there are teams that become destiny’s darlings, teams like the Ya Gotta Believe Mets, and perhaps this is as good a reason as any to explain how the Jets made the playoffs in the first place, and what they are doing here now, 60 minutes from the Super Bowl.
In the corner of that visiting locker room, one of the many unsung heroes, an invaluable special-teamer named Wallace Wright, was asked whether he thinks the Jets are a team of destiny.
“I think so, I think so,” Wright said. “We’ve had ups and downs this year, everybody talked about, ‘If Indianapolis woulda kept their starters in’ — they tried to win that game. And Cincinnati, you know, same thing. We knocked them out, then everybody said, ‘Oh, well they took their starters out in the third quarter and if they woulda kept ’em in’ . . . I mean, we can’t control that. All we can do is go out there and play our game.”
Destiny: The Jets won Super Bowl III in Miami. Super Bowl XLIV in is Miami.
Destiny: Curtis Painter.
Destiny: Every field-goal kicker these days is turning into Scott Norwood.
Destiny: Buddy Ryan, Rex’s dad, won a Super Bowl with the Jets.
“We started very strong, so we knew what type of team we were, and then we had that little dry spell when things weren’t going that great,” tight end Dustin Keller said, “but it just so happened that it happened right in the middle part of the season where it didn’t really matter that much — if you’re gonna have losses, that’s the time to get rid of ’em. And then we kinda hit our high points at the end of the season, and when all these other teams lost so we can make it into the playoffs, and that was just huge for us, and we’re playing our best football right now . . . that’s destiny.”
Boastradamus was right: No one wants to play the Jets. Not even Peyton Manning. I’m reminded of the scene in “A Bronx Tale,” when the Hells Angels, going back on their word not to cause trouble, start spraying beer around the mob bar, and Chazz Palminteri walks back in and tells them, “That wasn’t very nice. Now youse gotta leave.”
One of the intruders says, “I’ll tell you when the f- – – we leave, all right? Get the f- – – away from me.”
The bikers laugh as Palminteri walks to the door, and casually locks it.
Palminteri turns and walks toward the bikers at the bar and says matter-of-factly, “Now youse can’t leave,” before the mobsters wipe up the joint with them.
Sunday at 3 p.m. Ryan and the Jets get another crack at Manning. It is the fourth quarter and the Jets keep coming and the Colts are wearing down under 60 minutes of hell, and Manning is under siege, running for his life.
Now youse can’t leave.