After another long and arduous season of watching football and cheering and screaming and jumping, cursing, layghing, crying, hand-wringing and dancing, we fans should all be hoping for a safe and close, exciting Super Bowl. I know I am. However…and this is not NFL smack talk, just a feeling.
It has become apparent to me that people are a tad scared about the New England Patriots losing this Super Bowl XLII game to the New York Giants this coming Sunday in Glendale, Arizona. New England fans, that is, seem scared…just a little bit. It is as if all the energy spent cheering for the perfect season and the perfect (so far) playoffs has drained many fans of the ability to continue to sustain the full-on hope and belief that the real, live and here-and-now perfect season in the NFL could actually come to its logical fruition in less than a week’s time.
The biggest Patriots fan I have ever met told me this evening that he feels something “somewhere down in my cockles, you know?” (No, I don’t know, really, what a cockle even is. Nor do I want to.) He said would not be shocked were New England to do the unthinkable and lose to the Giants. I told him that I, too, had felt this way when New York beat Green Bay in Antarctic conditions after having just pulled the horse out from under the Dallas Cowboys in Jerry Jones’ house just a week before.
Now, however, I feel that I would be surprised if the Giants were to win this game. Shocked, I think, would actually be a very large understatement. I don’t mean to take anything away from the Giants. What they have accomplished this year is almost right up to a distant second compared to the season Belichick and New England is having. I still think Green Bay is the better overall team. They just had a bad day. Even a genius can sometimes do poorly on a test. That’s why many college professors don’t put much emphasis on single-day tests. Instead, they look at how the student does overall, in different aspects of the course, throughout the year.
While the Giants have definitely gotten better as the season has progressed and deserve to be in the spot they are in, considering the adversity they had to battle through to get to the Super Bowl, I just have this sinking feeling that they are like the Giants team that last went to the Super Bowl, and could very well be at least as outmatched. That New York squad was beaten down by the Baltimore Ravens in 2001 and the final score was 34-7. I do expect this Giants team to be able to score more than a touchdown. It is just that I expect this Patriots team to score more than 34 points, too.
Usually, if I spit something like this out in public, the football gods take their revenge by proving me entirely wrong. So I am saying that I think they will turn out to be more like the Atlanta Falcons of 1999; the Chargers of 1995; the Buffalo Bills. I say this because now I can’t lose. If I am right…well, it is what I feel. If I am wrong, then we get a great game and the underdog gets to add another chapter of greatness to the New York Giants Championship History. I wish them the best.
Right now, the FanYard community thinks the game will be closer than I do. The Yardstick for the Super Bowl favors the Undefeateds by just a touchdown, with 74% calling for a New England victory.
January 29th, 2008 at 5:21 am
Hey…I want on the blog roll twice if NFLSD is!
One side of me thinks, the Giants are the last team to really threaten the Pats and they could pull this off. The other side thinks they have used every ounce of everything they had to get this far. Who knows. I think either team could win but I will be less surprised if the Pats do it.