Think about it this way:
One year ago this morning, the only thing that could possibly have been weighing heavily on Joe Paterno’s mind was the possibility that the fervent likes of http://www.firejoepa.com might attract a few more hundred followers who might wonder aloud (or at least online) if maybe football hadn’t passed the great man by. Like, a decade or two ago.
One year ago this morning, Rex Ryan said to a roomful of reporters: “You’re damned right I think we can go to the Super Bowl. Why would I say it if I didn’t believe it?” And even if there were already plenty of precincts around the country whose eyes started to roll involuntarily whenever Rex opened his mouth, around here there were still a majority of acolytes who believed, without question, that if Rex said it, it was so.
One year ago this morning the Mets were a mess, but they hadn’t yet achieved an epic, historic level of messiness. We were still a week or two from being formally introduced to the name “Irving Picard” and the term “clawback.” The Mets hadn’t yet announced they were seeking a limited partner, hadn’t yet selected one, hadn’t yet reneged on that selection, hadn’t yet started trolling waters for anyone with enough nickels and quarters to keep the operation solvent.
One year ago this morning, if you had told even the most fevered Rangers fan that the Broadway Blueshirts would be sitting alone in first place in a year’s time, you would have gotten a look and a half. If you had have told a Knicks fan that Amar’e Stoudemire would be the second-best — and maybe third-most-important player on the roster a year on, you might have been blown back by the gales of laughter. If you had told a Giants fan they’d be tip-toeing toward the playoffs as Week 17 approached, they’d have said: “Why should this year be any different than any other year?”
One of the oldest clichés in the lexicon is this one: What a difference a day/week/month/year makes. It became a cliché because, mostly, there really isn’t THAT much of a difference. We just think there is because we get a little bit older day to day and year to year, a little crankier, a little more oblivious to things, a little less impassioned about them.
Except sometimes, there really can be years that seem to shake things up like a high-speed blender. This year was like that in sports. It was a year in which Stevie Williams, who had made as much money and earned as much fame as a man who carries golf bags for a living can, earned just as many headlines as the man for whom he carried those bags into history. Tiger Woods would finally win a minor tournament before the year was out, but not before Williams took his pink slip and tried to light Tiger’s tail — and everything else — on fire.
It was a year in which the Yankees had what was, for them, a less-than-satisfying season because they never got out of the first round of the playoffs — yet which was, for the sadistic element of their fan base, a delightful romp of a season because the Red Sox suffered what we have quickly come to understand was the worst collapse in the sport’s history. Misery loves company, after all, especially when thy neighbor’s misery is far worse than your own.
And it was, agonizingly, a year in which sports was not afforded dispensation from the worst of the world’s problems. Maybe there were a handful of Penn State alums and college football junkies who remembered who Jerry Sandusky was last New Year’s Day, but by this New Year’s Eve there isn’t a soul anywhere who isn’t aware of the darkness he allegedly ushered to a place formerly known as Happy Valley, who doesn’t know how Paterno’s one-time right hand wound up dragging him by his blue vest down into the muck with him, an epic fall which hasn’t come close to reaching the bottom of the mud pit yet.
Maybe you knew who Bernie Fine was, but you probably wouldn’t have guessed why you would be recalling his name now. Maybe you remembered Bill Conlin from his many years of playing the part of the curmudgeonly sportswriter on a television roundtable show, but it’s unlikely you could have understood the depths where his own alleged demons had taken him, either. Sports, we have long believed, was a place where you came to escape the world’s more haunting problems. Not this year.
And yet, for all of that, 2011 also provided a splendid tableau of reminders why we dust off our lawn chairs and devote so much time to caring about these games and the people who play them.
Especially around here.
For the last time, Mets fans thrilled to the blurry brilliance of Jose Reyes roaring into third base after hitting a ball in the gap. For a second year in a row, the Jets elbowed their way into the AFC Championship Game, a tour that thrilled their fans even if kickoff in Pittsburgh now seems like it happened sometime in the mid-’70s thanks to a disappointing follow-up season. For a second time in four years, the Giants threw a straight right hand that knocked the mighty Patriots to their knees, that right hand attached, of course, to the splendid right arm of Eli Manning.
The Devils, dead and buried and written off as one of the worst teams in hockey, made a heart-stopping (if unsuccessful) playoff push once they welcomed an old organizational warhorse named Jacques Lemaire back in the fold, and the Rangers introduced a new generation of fans to the sights, sounds and sensations of playoff hockey at the Garden … even if they decided it wouldn’t be a complete experience without ripping out the hearts of those fresh-faced fans in the end.
But in a year when we realized just how valuable a reliable idol can really be, we found ourselves invested — as a city and as a sports town and everyway else we can be united by these games — in one of the most familiar names of this or any other era. For one of the few times during his sublime 15-year stay on the city’s stage, Derek Jeter had looked human and humbled: by a sub-par 2010 season, by a contract squabble that had been uglier than it needed to be, and by a start to the 2011 season that ultimately landed him on the disabled list in mid-June.
While he was gone, the Yankees kept winning, and they did so thanks in part to the young legs and exciting talent of a kid named Eduardo Nunez and to the remarkably still reliable right arm of Mariano Rivera, who would soon join Jeter in history’s embrace when he became the sport’s all-time saves leader in August. Jeter laughed when he was asked if he knew who Wally Pipp was, but even as he played along you could sense how badly he wanted to prove there was life still in his 37-year-old legs.
And there was. There was life, and there was still an unparalleled sense of drama and timing when Jeter stepped into a fat David Price pitch on the afternoon of July 9, two days before the All-Star Game, and he sent a baseball high into the summer sky, far beyond the left-field fence at Yankee Stadium. It was the kind of moment that is impossible to predict and impossible to let go, because even the most skeptical cynic and the most cynical skeptic can find nothing to countermand what happened then: a 3,000th hit, a home run, delivered practically on demand.
It doesn’t make Yankees fans feel any better when they think about what happened three months later against the Tigers, and can’t make anyone feel better about the darker elements that crowded the sports pages this year. And maybe that’s for the best. Maybe what we need most of all from the games and the players and the scores and the characters is balance. Maybe the more we recognize the demons lurking on the games’ perimeters, the more we can appreciate the better angels of our nature. And of our games.
Good luck to you, 2012. You have a hell of an act to follow.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com