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THIRTY THOUSAND FEET ABOVE AMERICA — To all of you down there, to the flyover country I’m currently flying over?
Sorry.
To the fine sporting folk of Northern California, to all of your West Coast brethren, to those of you down South and up North and everywhere else south of South Amboy, N.J., and north of Northampton, Mass., and west of Eastchester, N.Y.?
Yeah. Sorry to all of you, too. Because these next 12 days? They belong to us again, to New York and New England, to Gotham and Olde Towne, to New York and New Jersey, to Massachusetts and Maine, to that great DMZ of Connecticut that finds itself betwixt and between.
The rest of you? You can go on with your lives for the next 12 days, and you can grumble about how self-important we are here in our Northeast Corridor bubble — and few are going to argue with you. Hell, we might not even argue with you. We just won’t have time to argue with you because we’ll be too busy arguing with each other about the important things in life:
Manning vs. Brady.
Coughlin vs. Belichick.
Loathing the Jets vs. laughing at them.
New England clam chowder vs. Manhattan clam chowder.
Sam Adams vs. Brooklyn Lager.
All of the burning issues of our time. Yes, yes, I know, I know. This is all tiresome to those of you who do not believe that Boston is really the Hub of the Universe or that New York is the capital of the world. This is as irksome as a scratchy sweater if you don’t believe the sun rises just east of Hyannis Port and sets just west of the Outerbridge Crossing (which, you know, technically it does … but you probably don’t want to hear it).
You’ve been here before. You endured the first decade of the 2000s, when the Red Sox and the Yankees escalated baseball’s cold war to unprecedented heights, then added a couple of hot-war encounters that probably landed both of us just this side of intolerable (if not wholly on that side of the line).
You had to listen to the likes of Johnny Damon, an eloquent and elegant veteran of both sides of the great divide, who one day a few years ago, seized by the wonder of the ancient rivalry, declared: “It can get to where you forget you don’t play 162 games against each other. Sometimes you can think the whole season is about New York versus Boston, the Yanks against the Sox.”
We’ll presume he felt differently the last couple of years, stationed as he was in the civic outposts of Detroit and St. Petersburg, Fla.
Oh, and here’s the thing: This isn’t going away. Yes, for those of you without a dog in this hunt, the next 12 days will pass as briskly as a sentence at Sing Sing or Shawshank, and by the end you’ll have a hard time figuring out which fan base you find more insufferable, and you’ll find yourself begging for a presidential order cancelling the game entirely.
But enough about Rex Ryan.
You know what else lies out there? A looming apocalyptic showdown between the Rangers and the Bruins for a berth in the Stanley Cup finals, and for all rage and anger that have marked the battle lines between the other civic rivals, only one set of players has ever climbed the boards to get after another set of fans.
So get ready for that. And, well, it sure seems possible that the Celtics and Knicks might be battling for the final playoff slot in the East (assuming the Knicks aren’t really at the start of a 56-game losing streak which, given what we’ve seen lately, is no guarantee).
And there’s always the Yankees and the Red Sox. This year the Sox will celebrate 100 years of Fenway Park, and of course the guest of honor on anniversary day will be the same one from 1912. You’ll be hearing all about that soon enough, too.
For now? We’ll assault your senses with football. We’ll talk for hours on end about this Super Bowl, and about the one four years ago. We’ll talk about legacies and dynasties and destinies, and it’ll be one long party up and down I-95, and if the thought of that makes you want to stick a fork in your eye?
Yeah, sorry. We’ll try to keep it down to a dull roar.