Giants Win, World Collectively Scratches Head
Super Bowls hardly ever interest me. The Redskins haven’t made it to one in over 15 years and the way they are playing it looks like it will be another 15 years before they make it back to one. The commercials are getting worse and worse (though this year was a marked improvement over last year), and generally I could care less about the teams involved.
This year was different. The Patriots went into the game 18-0, all they needed to do was win one more game to make meaning of their undefeated season up to that point. With every fiber of my being I wanted the Patriots to lose. Normally I wouldn’t care about an AFC team, and as much as I like the ’72 Dolphins, I don’t really care about their record remaining intact. But after what the Patriots did to the Redskins, running up the score 52-7, converting twice on fourth down when they were already up by 20+ points, I lost all respect for Bill Belichick and wanted nothing more than to see the Patriots go down.
In my fantasy the Patriots would win every single game except for one; that one loss would come from the, at the time, winless Dolphins. The irony would be magnificent. The Dolphins didn’t pull that one out and so I just kept rooting against the Patriots; each game I hoped and prayed that they would lose. Eventually I ran out of games to cheer against them in and they had still not lost a game and they were in the Super Bowl, playing none other than the New York Football Giants.
The Giants are a divisional rival to the Redskins so it was extremely difficult to root for them. I justified it by telling myself that I wasn’t actually rooting for the Giants, but I was rooting against the Patriots; this made me feel slightly better. Since my perfect world was crushed when the Patriots unceremoniously beat the Dolphins, I crafted a new fantasy.
I decided that I wanted the Patriots to lose, and the Giants not to win. I’m not sure how that would work out exactly, but a boy can dream, can’t he? So after three quarters of extremely mundane football, the fourth quarter exploded with action, down by three and with 10 seconds left Tom Brady threw a Hail Mary pass on fourth and ten and missed it. The Giants had won the game – or so they thought. The team rushed the field – the celebration had begun, but there was still 1 second left on the clock, and the game wouldn’t be over until the Giants took that last snap. My fantasy was on its way to becoming a reality. The Patriots lost the game and the Giants didn’t actually win it.
Of course, the joy of that realization was short lived and five minutes later the officials somehow managed to clear the field and the Giants got off the last play of the Super Bowl. I was hoping since Belichick left the field before the game was over, showing what little sportsmanship he actually has, that the Patriots would simply forfeit the game. Maybe next year.
Other posts by Justin