'08 Super Bowl Champ New York Giants; The Cream Of The Crop

For most Giants fans, teams like the 1986 or 1990  Super Bowl Champs led by Lawrence Taylor might be among their top choices for all time favorite Giants team. 

But I was too young to appreciate the successes of these teams or to comprehend the difference between how it feels to have your team win it all, or to simply watch the Super Bowl for the love of the game.

Admittedly, I did not believe that the ’07-’08 team would be the one to finally achieve supremacy and let me experience the euphoria of being a fan of the Super Bowl Champs.  Luckily, they defied the odds and brought me a joy I had never known existed. 

February 4, 2008

I write this entry as one of the happiest girls in the world. The improbable has happened.  I believed it could all along. As a true fan, I had to. 

But, like most, I knew we were the underdogs, double digit underdogs at that.  I was excited and pumped up for this game for two weeks, with butterflies in my anxious stomach, but as soon as the game began, a strange calmness came over me that took me by such surprise I wondered what was wrong with me.  Then as the game progressed, I realized, I was calmly optimistic because I knew this team was as prepared and confident as the Patriots had been through their first 18 games. 

The Patriots confidence had turned to a quiet cockiness, almost like they were just going through the motions for 60 min until they could hoist the trophy.  The problem with this philosophy was that it proved several things, most of which only us skeptics believed to be true until the Super Bowl. The most important being, the Patriots are NOT the best team in NFL history. 

I do not only say this because they lost their undefeated season, I say this because of the way they played throughout the season, culminating with the Super Bowl. Had their entire season played out the way the first few weeks did, with giant (no pun intended) two digit winning margins, than I may have agreed.  However, it was apparent that they really had no interest in playing as hard as they could, or with as much passion as they could…they just wanted to win, and with as little effort as was necessary, playing to their competition. 

It was this mentality that the Giants uncovered in Week 17. They knew the Patriots underestimated them, and they knew that the Patriots had not seen a team, or a defense in particular, like theirs. 

They came out firing, looking like the team to beat.  And for the first three quarters of that supposedly meaningless regular season game, they were the team to beat.  When they came up just short, they didn’t look at it as a defeat, but as ammunition to run over everyone in their path on the road to a rematch. 

In just a matter of weeks, Giants fans around the globe watched their on again off again kid quarterback become a man, and a leader of men, on a field of green.  Where he once faltered time and again, Eli now shone, showing glimpses of the great quarterback lineage of the Manning family.  He had something to prove, it was his time, and his team in turn rallied behind him to prove together, they were a force to be reckoned with. 

There were three teams that stood in the Giants path to the Super Bowl; the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the Dallas Cowboys, and the Green Bay Packers. 

After the Giants beat Tampa Bay in an exciting wild card match up, I prayed they would beat the Cowboys…no Giants fan handles defeat to Dallas graciously, and I hoped that if we had to loose, it would be to Green Bay.  Who doesn’t love Brett Favre.  If your team has to loose, it should be to a man like him! 

But when team after team fell in the wake of the Giants’ new found chemistry, confidence, and dominance; things us fans only dreamt were possible suddenly seemed within our grasp. 

While, admittedly, there were moments leading up to the big game, that made me feel a bit hopeless (double digit spread), the crazy fan inside believed there was more than just hope.  And on that first eternity of a possession on Sunday night, the Giants proved that this would be a fight to the end, and they believed they would be the last G-Men standing! 

And in the final minutes, as Eli Manning escaped from the grasp of three Patriots lineman to launch a pass that seemed to hang in the air for an eternity, and as David Tyree made the impossible catch that will run on highlight reels for decades to come, I realized in a state of euphoria…I didn’t have to dream any longer!! ~Laura K. Wolpert

When a team makes you feel like that, how could you possibly select any other as your favorite?