Giants Complete Makeover and Rewrite History

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/04/sports/football/04araton.html

February 4, 2008
Sports of The Times
Giants Complete Makeover and Rewrite History
By HARVEY ARATON
Glendale, Ariz.

The statements came early, beginning with a game-opening drive for a field goal that was one second short of an eye-opening 10 minutes, a Super Bowl record for ball hogging. How do you stop the great Tom Brady? Keep him off the field. And when he comes on? Hit him, harass him, as we’ve seldom seen in the Brady-Bill Belichick era.

Kawika Mitchell for 7 yards on second down in the second quarter, Justin Tuck for another 7 on the very next play, two more in-your-face declarations to Brady that this wasn’t the Giants’ defense he had toyed with, racked up 38 points against, in the final game of the regular season.

Thus was the transformation of the Giants as a rushless, winless early-season disaster in the making on the way to completion Sunday evening. They survived their first-half offensive blunders, passed the Patriots and defeated them, 17-14, when Eli Manning hit Plaxico Burress, the man who had predicted victory, for a 13-yard touchdown with 35 seconds left in Super Bowl XLII.

The unlikeliest of Giants championship runs went from Tampa to Dallas, Green Bay to Glendale, hurdling the best of the National Football Conference and finally a team that was supposed to be one for the ages. Given the circumstances, there has never been such a postseason, from unheralded wild card to the winner’s circle.

Although eight other wild-card teams had taken the long road to the Super Bowl since 1970, four others eventually winning, none of the Giants’ predecessors faced the challenge of an 18-0 opponent when they got there.

These arguments can be made only subjectively, of course. But that is what the Giants earned at University of Phoenix Stadium, a place in the conversation about all-time playoff achievement, by refusing to be the Patriots 19th victim, after being the 16th.

Greatness, the pursuit of it as well as the evaluation of it, inspires passion, and ultimately creates the most compelling theater. Along the road to the Super Bowl, the Patriots attracted intense attention for every step and near misstep, from right out of the gate — and into Spygate — in Week 1 against the Jets in New Jersey.

The Patriots were the N.F.L.’s lightning rod, throughout the regular season, to their 38-35 Super Bowl warm-up victory over the Giants, gallantly competitive that Sunday night when they didn’t have to be, building postseason character in an event that was called “one of the proudest moments I had in the 2007 season” by N.F.L. Commissioner Roger Goodell.

Yes, Belichick’s efforts to maximize his DVD collection by surreptitiously taping at least one opponent, probably more, and the league’s subsequent decision to destroy the seized tapes put Goodell in the cross hairs of Arlen Specter, the Eagles-and-attention-loving senator from Pennsylvania. That said, it must also be nice to know that someone in Washington cares enough about the Super Bowl to contribute in so timely a fashion to the spectacle of it all.

The men who preside over our professional games never get too publicly gleeful when a franchise turns dynastic, given the number of owners in markets big and small wanting a turn. But do not believe for a second that they fail to recognize the business value of extended championship excellence, of brand familiarity in the postseason, no matter how much they push legislation for competitive equality.

Who would really have preferred the old numbing parity to the Patriots? Super Bowl Sunday is a guaranteed ratings bonanza, a de facto national holiday, but when was there a game more widely anticipated than this one? How much more stunning and, yes, historic was the Giants’ unforeseen rise, all the way to the top, factoring in their symmetrical relationship with an undefeated superteam?

Baseball needs its Yankees (or maybe now we should say Red Sox) to raise its postseason profile. The N.H.L. has long suffered from lack of franchise identification on the national — actually, international — level. Think David Stern and his N.B.A. minions aren’t galvanized by the sudden prospect of the recently fortified Lakers and Celtics stalking each other again, coast to coast, for a good spell of years?

“We get criticized that we have parity,” Goodell said Friday, “and then we get criticized that we have a small number of teams that are dominant and I don’t think either one is actually accurate. The margin between a victory and a loss is very small. I think you saw that, even in the Patriots’ 18-0 streak.”

All said and done, 18-1, now. In the final analysis, dominant teams will elicit love from the homefront, antipathy from elsewhere, but they will be universally talked about, fussed over, scrutinized, criticized, grudgingly respected and, most of all, used as the primary measuring stick when eventually vanquished.

The Giants beat the Patriots on Sunday night, beat Brady and his record-setting offense in physical, sometimes brutal, old-time Giants fashion. Dragged them down and back from the precipice of immortality. It was more than a seventh league championship and third in the Super Bowl era. If you like, call it the most stunning postseason of all seasons.