The Giants just scored the first touchdown of the game. I’m a long-suffering New York Football Giants fan. It was harder when I was a kid. I still hate Joe Pasarcik – fellow long-suffering Giants fans will understand. A good friend of mine was a rabid fan. In fact, every member of his family were fans – they waited something like 25 years on a list to get season tickets. If you called their house on a game day, they wouldn’t pick up. If the Giants lost, the kids went to bed hungry. I'm making that last part up, but they were all crazy, God-fearing Giants fans.
I was living in Colorado when the Giants won in ’87 – a great place to watch Phil Simms’ Captain America impression in the second half. H and I were dating at the time. She watched in amazing disgust as I took the entire second half to verbally hammer a Broncos fan who showed up at the house wearing a blinking Denver logo hat. He was something of an oddball anyway (and not because he was a Broncos fan). We were living in Germany when Norwood handed the Giants the trophy in ’91. H was rooting for the Bills because she’s a native CNYer and a couple of her brothers love to whine about how Jim Kelly is the Charles Barkley of the NFL. We were here in CNY when the Giants didn’t show up for the game in 2000. Those same brothers (and a couple more – there’s eight of them in all) smugly sat in my living room, drinking my beer, eating my nachos, and forgetting about Ray Lewis' criminal past.
Being a Giants fan here isn’t quite as lonely as being a Met fan here (of which I am also long-suffering), but it’s still not the same as watching a game just inside the odor ring that circles Secaucus. Tonight’s game only matters to New England. For me, it’s a long shot, but you gotta believe.
PS: Who in America likes Bryant Gumble or can listen to Chris Collinsworth for more than 20 seconds?
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