INDIANAPOLIS — And so it begins, indoors in Indiana and outdoors in Philadelphia, Cincinnati and Green Bay, a month of frantic football, a month in which everyone will channel their inner Jim Cantore and try to figure out what all this will look like in 30 days, outdoors in North Jersey.
The wild-card games kick off a wild month that will include 10 games involving 12 teams that have bruised and bled for five months, all for the privilege of freezing in the presumed February frost of MetLife Stadium.
And you know something?
For all the hand-wringing about snow and wind-chill and tumbling mercury, there are exactly 636 men who don’t care even a little bit about long-range forecasts, no matter how dire and dour they may be. Those 636 men comprise the active rosters for the dozen teams who have qualified for this NFL Tournament, for this Road to the Super Bowl (hell, call it the Turnpike to Triumph) and there isn’t one of them who wouldn’t like to be standing on the field at the Meadowlands on Feb. 2, whether it’s 20 below or 70 above, whether it’s snowy or sunny, icy or nice-y.
And we will be waiting for them. We haven’t quite waited an eternity for this, but it has been long enough. The last time a football game was played on local soil, the winner earning the title of champion of the world, it was Dec. 30, 1962.
The Cuban Missile Crisis was still fresh in the memory of all Americans. “Big Girls Don’t Cry” had just been replaced atop the Billboard Hot 100 after a three-week run by “Telstar.” “Wagon Train” and “Hazel” led the Nielsen ratings and “Lawrence of Arabia” was the top-grossing movie.
On Park Avenue that morning, Giants coach Allie Sherman had taken a stroll near the team hotel and been bathed in brilliant sunshine and a gentle, mild breeze. Ninety minutes later, as he walked onto the field at Yankee Stadium for warm-ups, he discovered the temperature had dipped to 13 degrees, the winds had whipped up to 40 mph. He went to take a sip from his styrofoam coffee cup; his java was frozen.
Then he looked up to watch his quarterback, Y.A. Tittle, make a mighty heave of a football, saw the ball get swallowed in a jet stream and tumble to the ground maybe five yards from Tittle’s spikes.
“I think we just lost our passing game,” Sherman said, to no one in particular.
The Packers won the game, 16-7.
“Once you start dealing with Mother Nature,” Sherman told me a few years ago, not long before the NFL announced an end to the 51-year New York championship embargo, “you’ll have yourself a memorable game. Whenever you add weather into the equation, you never know what’s going to happen.”
He laughed.
“People always said that Vince [Lombardi’s] teams must’ve had a big advantage in those games because they lived in Green Bay, as if the players all lived in igloos and Vince never put the heat on in the locker room. But if you ask those guys, gave them truth serum, they’d tell you how miserable it is to be in the cold. Sometimes, in a game of endurance like football, those are the cards you’re dealt.”
So, yes: from now until kickoff on the second day of February, we will be buffeted by weather questions, even as, this weekend, they will play elimination games in Green Bay (site of the fabled Ice Bowl) and Cincinnati (where in 1982 the Bengals and Chargers played an AFC Championship game where the temperature was minus-9 and the wind chill minus-37).
But we will also be nourished by the games they play. Nothing, after all, compares to the run-up to the Super Bowl, with one-and-dones looming every few hours every weekend, an NCAA Tournament feel to the ultimate tough-guy test. All of them pointed in the same direction. All of them pointing toward us. In their own way, the 636 men vying for the 106 spots still standing in 30 days will be humming the old letter carrier’s hymn:
Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds …
See you in four weeks, lads. Now let’s get on with it.