THE first reaction, for those who do not bleed Big Blue blood, for those who do not drink blue-tinted Kool-Aid, is a good, loud scoffing. The Giants? You think the Giants have a chance to beat the Patriots? In the Super Bowl? For real?
The second reaction is laughter.
Sure, there are 12½ reasons for the uninitiated to think that Super Bowl XLII will litter the Arizona desert with one of the worst mismatches in Super Bowl history, one to make the 34-7 thrashing the Giants absorbed from the Ravens during their last trip this far seem tame, humane and competitive by comparison.
“I love Vegas,” was the cheery message that Giants linebacker Antonio Pierce had delivered last week through a defiant smile, his way of admitting that not only have the Giants looked at the point spreads that have defined them as underdogs for every second of their three-week playoff run, but also they’ve gained an appreciation from them.
“Let the experts think what they want to think,” Michael Strahan said Sunday, after the 23-20 overtime NFC Championship game thriller against the Packers that made the Giants 3-for-3 in humbling those experts was complete. “We’ll still show up.”
And if we have learned anything at all, the first piece of any puzzle involving underdogs and upsets involves just that: showing up, showing up on a roll, showing up on a run, showing up with a firm belief that anything is possible, especially in sports.
The Jets showed up against the Colts in Miami in 1969, and Villanova showed up against Georgetown in Lexington in 1985. The Patriots showed up against the Rams in New Orleans in February of 2002, and Jack Fleck showed up for his U.S. Open playoff with Ben Hogan in 1955. Hell, even Upset showed up for his match race against Man o’War one magical day at the racetrack, and thereby gave us the very term that injects so much life and romance into the games we watch.
But the underdog run that evokes the strongest memories now is the one that N.C. State went on in 1983, the unheralded and underwhelming Wolfpack stringing together one cardiac finish after another on the way to Albuquerque, to The Pit, where the Final Four was supposed to be a basketball coronation for the mighty Phi Slamma Jamma Houston Cougars of Clyde Drexler and Hakeem (then Akeem) Olajuwon and Michael Young and Larry Micheaux.
“I’m not sure if I want to play against those guys or if I want to buy a ticket and watch those guys,” was the way Jim Valvano, the N.C. State coach, put it on the eve of the championship game. “We can’t go up and down the floor with them for 40 minutes, because there isn’t a team on earth that can go up and down the floor with them for 40 minutes.”
So Valvano had a plan: “We want to make it a 22-minute game.”
Bill Belichick, architect of a masterful defensive game plan for the Giants against the Bills in Super Bowl XXV and crafter of a similarly ingenious strategy for the Patriots against the Rams in Super Bowl XXXVI, knows all about those tricks. In essence, he shortened both of those would-be 60-minute slugfests to 32- or 33-minute sprints.
Twelve days from now, that’ll be the last thing on his mind, thanks to an offense that, in the perfect conditions of an Arizona dome, will have optimum opportunity to keep the scoreboard clicking like a pinball machine. And for all the plaudits the Giants received after their near-upset of the Pats in Week 17, they still allowed 38 points. Thirty-eight points won’t get the job done in Glendale.
The Giants have to be great: As great as they’ve been for three weeks. And they have to be fortunate: As fortunate as they’ve been for three weeks. As great and as fortunate for 60 minutes as the Wolfpack was for 40 almost 25 years ago in New Mexico, one miracle in the southwest that could well inspire another.
“All we knew,” Valvano said when that miracle was done, “is that going down the stretch, we wanted to have a chance to win the game. We could have lost in this tournament about 10 different times. We just never did. And now we never will.”
The Giants could have lost when the Buccaneers jumped on them early, could have lost when the Cowboys were driving on them late, could have lost when the Packers won the coin flip in overtime and handed the ball to Brett Favre. They just never did. Soon enough, we’ll know if they ever will.