IT was a steamy night, designed more for pitchers and catchers than for kickers and quarterbacks, a baseball night all dolled up in blue for the beginning of a football season. The fans were there because they are always there, 79,742 of them, so many who still go all the way back to the Polo Grounds with the Giants.
“The greatest fans in all of sports!” Michael Strahan gushed in the celebratory run-up, after stepping out of a huge replica of the Vince Lombardi Trophy, clutching and waving the real Vince Lombardi Trophy. Those fans let loose a wall-thrumming roar then, louder than any that followed during the 16-7 Giants victory that served as an almost anti-climactic main event.
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One last time, it was the 2007 Giants who were foremost on the minds of the people inside the Meadowlands, and the 2008 Giants who served as the straight men. The new version read their lines properly, hit their marks and made just enough plays to make sure the night ended properly, and fittingly.
Starting next week, in St. Louis, they become the focal point.
“The key thing,” coach Tom Coughlin said, “is that we opened at home, we won at home, and that is a nice way to start.”
Once the game began, there were moments when the Giants looked like Superteam and moments when they looked like they’d been introduced to each other five minutes before kickoff. They were helped mightily by the fact the Redskins looked like they’d have a hell of a time getting a first down off Appalachian State.
So what does it mean?
“It’s the first game,” Eli Manning said. “It felt like a first game.”
Meaning: It’s all so difficult to decipher. There was another nationally televised opener at Giants Stadium a long time ago, a Monday night in September of 1991 when the fans gathered and the players waved their arms and everyone felt like destiny had carried the ball from early winter to late summer. The 49ers left 16-14 losers, making Ray Handley 1-0 on his path toward Canton, and . . .
We all know how that turned out, how the Handley Era was more defined by the Vince Lombardi’s Turnpike stop than by his trophy, how those ’91 Giants, who looked so good against the Niners, looked so awful against so many others, and a long period of darkness was about to descend upon the Giants.
We also know about the thrashing the Giants absorbed in Weeks 1 and 2 last year, about being down 17-0 at halftime to the Redskins in Week 3, about resilience and recovery and renaissance and how few judgments matter early in a football season.
So the challenge is this: What do you want to believe? What do your eyes tell you to believe? Do you believe that the Eli Manning we saw across most of the first half – remarkably similar to the version we saw last winter – is the real indicator of who he is? Or do we focus on the less-than-pedestrian second half that recalled the less-celebrated hours of last autumn?
Do you believe the defense is as good as it looked, as it swallowed the Redskins whole and barely seemed to register the absence of Strahan and Osi Umenyiora? Or do you want to remind yourself that it was Jason Campbell trying to get stuff done against them, and that Mathias Kiwanuka spent the game’s final play writhing in agony?
Do you believe Brandon Jacobs and Plaxico Burress are ready to be Franco Harris and Lynn Swann, the way they seemed last night? Are you spooked by the fact that the Giants won despite being minus-one in turnovers?
There will be time enough to worry about the worrisome stuff, and enjoy the enjoyable stuff. For the Giants, 2007 ended last night. This year arrives next week.