The Pathfinder was a bright, blinding orange, and it was overrun by decals, some of them weather-beaten and dimmed by the years, some going back to the last time the Denver Broncos were Super Bowl participants.
“That was a week in Miami, and the year before that it was a week in San Diego,” Broncos fan Colin McFee said. “Put it this way: we packed a little differently for those trips.”
McFee and three friends had taken this week off months ago, when the Broncos were merely favorites to make the Super Bowl and not the actual AFC champions. Another friend has a house and spare rooms in Westfield, N. J., and one of them had a hookup for tickets, so the decision was an easy one. Before heading there, they’d pulled off on exit 16W, figured they’d scout out MetLife Stadium.
“Not much to look at,” McFee said. “But it’ll do.”
It’ll do fine, actually. Seven days out, the sunshine that had thrown a crimp into the hockey game at Yankee Stadium had given way to flurries that seem determined to grab hold of the narrative for the football game at MetLife next Sunday. A perfect New York slogan for January of 2014: “Too Sunny For Hockey, Too Snowy For Football.”
McFee and his road-trip mates don’t care. They’d have trekked to Nome, Alaska, if that’s where Roger Goodell had sold the game. The workers who were furiously finishing up the tents and the video boards and the unaccounted-for scaffolding all over the MetLife parking lot didn’t mind; they were happy for the overtime, even as the daily dose of snow dutifully left behind its regular dusting.
John Fox? The Broncos coach is two months removed from an operating-room table and a date with a scalpel that replaced his aortic valve, a procedure he knew he’d need from the time it was first diagnosed in 1997, when he was the Giants’ defensive coordinator. A little snow in the forecast won’t ruin his week.
Down to his high school playing weight now, grateful his decision to put off the inevitable had only cost him a month of work and nothing more precious than that, Fox clearly set a tone for how the Broncos and the Seahawks surely will handle the inevitable questions of the weather — and the inevitability of the weather itself.
“The elements are part of strategy,” Fox said. “To be a championship team you have to be weatherproof.”
Besides, this wasn’t a day to worry about whether North Jersey will be visited by another round of squalls and storms and slushy misery, or if the mercury will keep dropping like the local governor’s approval rating, or if the Broncos and their top-rated offense should bother showing up in the cold in six days to face the Seahawks and their top-rated defense.
No. As the team planes descended from 30,000 feet through the clouds, as they both touched down at United Airlines Maintenance Hangar 54 at Newark Liberty within a few hours of each other, it didn’t much matter there would be no South Beach or Bourbon Street in their daily agendas this week.
“This,” Denver receiver Wes Welker said, “is a business trip. That’s all.”
Welker has twice been on business trips of similar import before, so he knows the drill. So does Peyton Manning, a two-time participant and one-time champion, who brushed off questions about his legacy and his future and looked ready and relaxed and eager to get on with the business of planning and preparing.
“I actually feel better than I thought I would at this stage,” Manning said, and there is little doubt that sings like a sweet melody in the ears of the NFL, which delights in having its stars shine on the brightest possible stage.
“I feel very good.”
The Seahawks, of course, are a young team when measured by chronology and almost impossibly green in Super Bowl experience. Only one player — receiver Ricardo Lockette and his seven career catches and roster spot on last year’s 49ers — has any at all.
“Even though we’re young we have a mature perspective,” said Seattle coach Pete Carroll, who coached the Jets for about 15 minutes two decades ago. “We are well aware that we just crossed the country to play in the biggest football you can play in.”
A week out from the Big Game, a few hours in to the festivity, there was a lot to feel good about. The first predictions for Sunday read cold, and maybe a little soggy, but there are no signs — yet — of Nor’easters or vortexes or anything of that sort looming like a mugger in the shrubs. The teams arrived safely. The fans are trickling in, the ones with rooting interests.
And the city is ready. It may need some long johns and a couple of extra layers. But by all accounts, we’re as ready as we’ll ever be. Six days from Sunday. Here we go.