Please ... Proceed

The kids skipped school. Not all of them, obviously, but it sure seemed like it to me, stuck on the R train into Manhattan with a pack of chanting truants. "Let's go, Gi-ants, clap clap clap clap clap," over and over again. "E-li Mann-ing, clap clap clap clap clap." And, naturally, a lot of noise about "18-1." A subway car full of acne, Plaxico Burress jerseys and adolescent smugness. No commute could be more irritating.

On Broadway, hours before the scheduled start of the victory parade, the sidewalks teemed with blue shirts, white shirts, face paint and championship hats. Separated by metal barriers, fans threw rolls of toilet paper back and forth across the street, hooting at lobs that fell short. Sons sat atop fathers' shoulders, daughters stood on their toes for a better view of the crowd, NYPD vehicles and city buses careened down the open road. Spontaneous cheers erupted every few minutes. I quietly prayed for the "Cloverfield" monster to appear.

Presumably riding on recycled Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade floats, the victors eventually rolled right by my building, throwing off enough noise to distract much of the 45th floor. Secretaries had decorated the office with posters, and radios blared out live coverage from WFAN. When the traveling party ground to a halt at City Hall, Eli and company hopped off and gave a set of characteristically bland speeches. Like Doc Gooden in 1986, but hopefull for different reasons, Plaxico didn't make it out for the celebration.

I take no great satisfaction from my bold and wildly accurate prediction of a New York victory in Super Bowl XLII (I'm sure you all read it in the pages of the North Adams Transcript last Saturday. No? Well, you'll have to take my word for it. Trust me, it was there).

Okay, that's a lie. I was absolutely thrilled to see the Patriots' perfect season snuffed out in the desert breeze, even if it had to be at the hands of the loathsome Giants. No reward could be more fitting for a franchise equal parts insufferable and classless, a franchise possessed of the inclination to cheat and, as we will undoubtedly soon learn, the wherewithal to cover it up. I don't normally put a lot of stock in karma, but if anything could convince me of its worth, it was the sight of the most dominant team in the league blowing apart like a broken tumbleweed. The Pats sowed strife and overconfidence, and reapt the wind.

As I foresaw, Belichick put together an unnecessarily conservative game plan. Not, as I had thought, by an overreliance on Lawrence Maroney, who only carried the ball 14 times during a game in which both teams had equal amounts of possession. By design, the Pats threw underneath and into the flats early, not looking downfield until well into the second half. When Tom Brady did look for Randy Moss later in the game, pressure from the Giants' front four prevented strong throws, leading to the unusual sight of the MVP's passes fluttering to the ground aimlessly. An average gain of 4.3 yards per pass was easily the team's lowest of the year, well below its 8-yard average during the regular season.

As for the final drive and Eli's famous play, I have no earthly idea why Rodney Harrison -- the hardest hitter since Ronnie Lott -- went for the ball rather than the small of David Tyree's back. He didn't have a running start, to be sure, but Tyree was so far off the ground that Harrison would have been able to pull off a suplex or drop the receiver over his knee. Instead, he tried and failed to outleap a guy 10 years his junior, then mucked around on the ground afterwards, pathetically attempting to pry the ball loose after the play was over. Par for the course. I've never disliked a player quite so much.

The Giants have won three Super Bowls, but Tuesday marked the first-ever parade through the Canyon of Heroes where both baseball teams, the Rangers and the Knicks had marched. In 1987, Mayor Koch bizarrely retaliated against the decade-old move to New Jersey, calling the Giants a "foreign team" and denying them a parade permit. The franchise countered by throwing a victory party in the Meadowlands parking lot, kind of like holing up in the extra room in the garage after you've been kicked out of the house. We've all been there. Then, after the Wide Right game in 1991, it was considered inappropriate to celebrate with the nation so recently at war.

I suppose I'm pleased for Manning and Tyree and Ahmad Bradshaw and the Scottish kicker and the New York linemen not named Strahan or Umenyiora. That said, the sight and stench of Giants fans rejoicing is something no decent person should have to stomach. New England's defeat means the 1972 Dolphins will keep on laughing it up for the next 25 years; their humiliation means the rest of the league can expect to encounter more angry rampaging next fall.

Prez from "The Wire" put it succinctly. "No one wins -- one side just loses more slowly." You're damn right. Such is life as a Buffalo Bills fan.