[collie1228]

Did I really say Branshaw? Must be thinking of the golfer . . . . Sorry, Bradshaw!

[2BNTV]

Originally Posted by brostholder

The G-Men played a courageous game against a punishing defense. In a game so evenly matched, it often comes down to special teams, either a great special teams play or a special team error. In this case (and in the Patriot vs Ravens game) it came down to a special team making an error. He knew the ball hit his knee...you could tell by his reaction when it happened. I don't know if I'm ready to count Eli among the elite QB's of the league, but he sure is getting close! Now on to the Superbowl!! It is going to be another epic battle. I'm sure NE fans remember "the catch".

I don't know it that reception was ever given a name but what a catch!!!!!!!

How about "Heady Catch or Helmet Grab".

Eli took a beating yesterday and I was very impressed that he stayed patient and didn't force anything as a turnover might have been disasterous.
Another Super Bowl win would end the discusssions as to whether he is ELITE.
I think he already is but it wouldn't hurt to win two.

Yesterday's game was one where sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. You need some luck to go on a magical run like in 2008.

It's a media's delight for the Pats and Giants to meet again in the Super Bowl.

GO BIG BLUE!!!!

[brostholder]

I love my NY Giants!!! Congrats to both teams for a great game.

[Northstar]

...GIANTS........Super Bowl Champs...

[natickdan]

It was a great game and although I'm a Patriots fan, any game that ends with one final play, a play that will define the game's outcome and one that causes both players and fans to hold their breath in anticipation, is a game worthy of being in the Super Bowl.

My hat off to the NY Giants!

[jblum315]

As a longtime Giants fan - I can only say "How Bout dem Gints?"

[coralway]

Originally Posted by brostholder

I love my NY Giants!!! Congrats to both teams for a great game.

Tuesday morning, 11 AM, a ticker tape parade down The Canyon of Heroes for The Super Bowl Champion New York Giants

[BostonCelt]

Go, Bruins.......

[2newyorkers]

Yeah Giants!!!! Great game!

[Graytop]

Originally Posted by brostholder

I love my NY Giants!!! Congrats to both teams for a great game.

We've certainly been treated to some good football, both conference championship games were excellent, and of course the Super Bowl,...hat's off to all the teams!

[George Bieniaszek]

I'm a Pats fan so a little disappointed today. Never-the-less, hats off to the G-MEN for a great win and an exciting Super Bowl. Commercials were good and Madonna's half time performance was very good!!!

[bluedog103]

Originally Posted by coralway

Tuesday morning, 11 AM, a ticker tape parade down The Canyon of Heroes for The Super Bowl Champion New York Giants

As the song goes, the Bronx is up and the Battery's down. Up the Canyon of Heroes. If you haven't been to a ticker tape parade and you have the opportunity, go, definitely go! Even now, with ticker tape a distant memory it's a great event. I've been to several parades and if I were anywhere near NY I'd be somewhere along lower Broadway tomorrow too.

[coralway]

Originally Posted by bluedog103

As the song goes, the Bronx is up and the Battery's down. Up the Canyon of Heroes. If you haven't been to a ticker tape parade and you have the opportunity, go, definitely go! Even now, with ticker tape a distant memory it's a great event. I've been to several parades and if I were anywhere near NY I'd be somewhere along lower Broadway tomorrow too.

Last one I went to was 2009, when the Yankees won the WS.

I shall be at tomorrow's celebration.

[2BNTV]

First of all, hats off to Tom Brady for being a great QB with class.

The win by the Giants was a great vicory. I was right in saying that my heart was in my mouth until the very end. A heart stopping moment for me beloved Giants. If that ball was deflected to Gronkowski and he caught it, I would have had to bear watching it on Sportscenter for the next twenty or thirty years.

I was right in predicting Manningham would have a good game and Eli would be the MVP.

Two Super Bowls in five years with the Giants coming from nowhere to be Champions.

As Yogi Berra said, "who woulda thunk it".

[2BNTV]

Here is an article in The New York Daily News, (Mike Lupica), that Giant fans would enoyed reading.

Super Bowl XLVI MVP Eli Manning has a flair for the dramatic - especially in the biggest moments.
It is late at Lucas Oil Stadium on Super Bowl Sunday, and the Giants’ locker room is still crowded with players and media and family and excitement and noise and enough energy to light the whole place. Maybe it is an hour since Tom Brady’s desperation pass into the end zone has been knocked out of the air, bouncing on the turf before Rob Gronkowski can even make his dive for it.
Archie Manning and Olivia Manning are outside the back door of the locker room, waiting in the hallway and they’re with one of their daughters-in-law, Cooper Manning’s wife. All of them are talking about the Super Bowl game they have just watched, how similar it is in so many ways to the one the Giants and Patriots played four years ago, mostly similar in the end because Eli Manning had taken his team down the field again, come from behind again, put his team into the end zone in the last minute of the Super Bowl.

And on top of everything else, this time he has done it in Indianapolis, where his brother Peyton only became one of the great quarterbacks of all time.

“Just a bit more drama to the night,” Olivia Manning said, “a little more magic.”

I go back into the Giants’ locker room now, and run into Cooper Manning, ask him about his kid brother and Peyton’s kid brother. Ask him about Eli becoming this kind of big-moment player, this kind of fourth-quarter player, finally putting aside the tired “elite” conversation now for a much better one, about how Eli Manning is suddenly and wonderfully recognized as the best pressure player of his sport right now.

Maybe any sport.

Cooper Manning, a smart, funny guy, smiled and said, “Put it this way: For a guy who was never in a single school play, he sure does have this flair for the dramatic, doesn’t he?”

It is that flair for drama that makes this Giants team one to remember for all times, out of all the New York teams in all the sports. I keep saying it, but for them to win two Super Bowls this way, from 10-6 and a wild card one time and from 7-7 this time, for them to have to win two NFC Championships in overtime along the way, for them to come from behind in the fourth quarter twice against Bill Belichick’s Patriots, yeah, it really is like Willis limped out twice.
Or like Namath won two guaranteed, crazy-underdog Super Bowls. Or the Rangers somehow put some kind of improbable Stanley Cup championships in with the one they won in 1994. Or the Mets won a World Series the way they did, coming from two runs down and two outs and nobody on in the bottom of the season, and then four years later did something like that again.

It was the drama. The drama of the little brother in the Manning family becoming the big guy. The drama of Tom Coughlin, a coach about to be fired so many times you lose count, now taking his place with the most revered coaches or managers in all of New York sports history, with the great Red Holzman, with Joe Torre, with Gil Hodges in 1969, pick any other name you want.

There are so many reasons why this Giants coach and this quarterback have been able to do what they have to done together, but here is a big one, even if neither one of them will ever come out and say it:

They both have to have a lot of screw-you in them. There it is. You tell them you think they can’t, and they will show you, in the biggest possible moments, that they can. You know what Coughlin and Eli are thinking about right now? They are thinking about showing everybody again next year, when the big game goes to New Orleans.

So much drama to this team, so many heroes, likely and unlikely. So many moments to remember. But you can start with these two moments, before a ball was snapped this season, one of them from last season:

John Mara saying, almost defiantly, after the Giants missed the playoffs despite a 10-6 record, that he wasn’t firing Tom Coughlin.

And then Jerry Reese, the brilliant general manager, best evaluator of talent in the business, being as defiant in his own quiet way in the run-up to this season, when he stood up and said that despite all the injuries and all the doubts and Plaxico Burress going to the Jets and all the rest of it, that his team was good enough to contend.

Mara was right there, shoulder to shoulder, with his general manager. When I asked him not long ago why he believed, when even his own fans didn’t believe in August and September, he simply said, “We still had No. 10.”

On the field at Lucas Oil Stadium, a few moments after the Lombardi Trophy had been given back to the Giants, Jerry Reese said, “Don’t ever be fooled by our quarterback. Ever. He is a baby-faced assassin.”

A few feet away from Reese, confetti was still being shot toward the roof of the place. He said, “The way Eli played tonight? He played that way all year. The throws he made tonight? He made those throws all year long. We’d sit there and look at film, week after week, even when we’d lose, and somebody in the room would say, ‘There’s a big-boy throw.’ And a few minutes later somebody else would say, ‘There’s another big-boy throw.’”

On a team of drama kings, the quarterback who was never in the school play became the star of the show. But there were others. Are you kidding?
There was Victor Cruz, the undrafted free agent out of UMass who became a star of his sport. Victor Cruz: Who only really got the shot he did because Steve Smith left and then Domenik Hixon got hurt.

There was Chase Blackburn, who was out of football and then came back to be such a huge part of this. I am standing watching the regular-season game between the Giants and Packers and Blackburn intercepts Aaron Rodgers and I turn to my son, the Giant fan, and honestly ask, “Who’s No. 93?” Not even knowing Blackburn was back on the roster.

On and on. Osi Umenyiora was supposed to be on his way out of town before the season was over, ended up being a sack-a-game guy again. Brandon Jacobs seemed to be talking his way out of town earlier in the season, and ends the season dancing on the stage at City Hall Plaza. And we wondered if Justin Tuck would ever be healthy enough to be Justin Tuck again, do at Lucas Oil the same thing he had done at University of Phoenix Stadium in Arizona four years before: Put Brady on the ground.

So many stories, so many moments, ending with the biggest moments in the Super Bowl. Tony Romo misses Miles Austin in December with a pass that would have put the Giants to sleep; it means Romo misses the throw that Eli doesn’t miss when the money is on the table. Cruz goes 99 against the Jets. It’s all a jumble now. Ahmad Bradshaw doesn’t get called for a fumble at old Candlestick Park, a punt bounces off Kyle Williams’ knee, Hail Mary pass to Hakeem Nicks at Lambeau, Packers receivers dropping nine balls that day.
Cruz’s fumble in Super Bowl 46 doesn’t count because the Patriots have 12 men on the field. Somehow later Eli threads the needle to Mario Manningham down the sideline in the fourth quarter from his 12, throwing one 50 yards in the air into double coverage and putting another one on the money as easily as dropping a coin into a parking meter.
Nothing easy about any of this this, all the way until the end, Archie Manning already having forgotten that the first victory in the playoff run didn’t have much drama, it was 24-2 against the Falcons.

“Maybe next year,” Eli’s dad said when it was over, “we can throw in a 28-7 once in a while.”

It would be nice. Just wouldn’t be Coughlin’s Giants, wouldn’t be Eli’s Giants. Not the way they roll, all the way into New York sports history. Again.

Drama kings. Kings of the world.

Again.