Giants-Jets Super Bowl might be more than just a dream

Giants-Jets Super Bowl might be more than just a dream
By Sam Borden ? Journal News columnist ? November 12, 2008


It's OK to dream about it. It is. There's still a long way to go, of course, but it's OK to dream about how good this New York football winter could turn out. About how the Giants and Jets could keep winning. About how the Giants and Jets could give us everything we thought the Yankees and Mets were going to give us the past few years.

It probably won't happen. That's what the odds tell us. The Jets and Giants, Giants and Jets have only made the playoffs in the same year five times. That's it. Five times. So the notion that maybe Tampa in February will look like the Meadowlands in December is certainly far-fetched. A green and blue Super Bowl isn't statistically likely.


It's OK to dream anyway. Right now it seems as real as ever, as possible as it has ever been. In 1986, the Giants were 9-2 and the Jets 10-1. The Jets finished the season with five straight losses and a defeat in the divisional round of the playoffs and the Giants ended up going on to win the Super Bowl. The dream of a Subway (or, more appropriately, New Jersey Transit Bus Lines) Super Bowl died quickly that year.

This year it feels different. The Giants are the best team in the league right now. They just are. The Titans may be undefeated but the Giants play in a better conference against better opponents and have better players. Somehow, they are better than they were last year, when they ran through the playoffs and upset the Patriots in Arizona.

The Jets are not nearly as dominant. Not even close, even if they did crush the Rams by 100 points last weekend. They beat up on the JV, which is what you're supposed to do. Their big test comes tomorrow night in Foxborough.

But the AFC is wide open this year, a complete toss-up that no one - no one - could feel confident predicting right now. For so long it felt like the regular season was just a prelude to the Patriots and Colts meeting in January, but Tom Brady is gone this year and Peyton Manning isn't the same. Suddenly it could be anybody's time in the AFC. It could be the Jets' time.

Baseball was supposed to give us this kind of dream. It did once recently, back in 2000, when Bernie Williams settled under a Mike Piazza fly ball to deep center, squeezed it and then dropped to one knee in celebration. New York was so alive then, and we thought surely it would happen again. In 2007, the Mets collapsed and the midges came in Cleveland; in 2008, the Mets collapsed and the Yankees were never there at all. The dream never materialized.

So now it's football. Now, instead of the possibility of an ALCS and NLCS playing out across Queens and the Bronx, we have an equally tantalizing scenario: AFC and NFC championship games being played in the same stadium.

It could happen. The Jets need to keep their running game going, need to keep Brett Favre from throwing too many passes to the other team. The Giants need to keep doing what they're doing, need to keep Plaxico Burress from single-handedly destroying everything around him. But it could happen.

It would be magical. New York will always be a baseball city, but football has a special place. It doesn't have the long, drawn-out buildup of a baseball summer, so a Giants and Jets January would be more staccato, more intense. It would be blue and green tailgaters crossing paths. It would be a more upstart, less-storied franchise trying to knock off the older establishment. No one thought we'd be here right now. This wasn't supposed to even be something to talk about this season. The Giants surprised everyone last year with their run and then they lost Michael Strahan to retirement and Jeremy Shockey to immaturity and Osi Umenyiora to injury in preseason. The Cowboys were the hot pick to run the NFC. Not the Giants.

Only somehow the Giants are even better this season. They are a more complete team, a total team, the kind of team where you don't even know who the best player really is. You just know the team wins.

The Jets give you that confidence, too. Not the same amount and not in the same way, but trading for Favre during the summer meant expectations went up. Then when Brady got hurt in Week 1 and the Colts struggled and the Jaguars never developed into the team everyone thought they would be, the Jets became part of a group of teams that could make a run in the AFC. And they're still there, playing for first place in the their division tomorrow night.

There's still a long way to go. We know that, know that anything could happen between now and Thanksgiving, between Thanksgiving and Christmas. That is how the NFL goes.

But it's OK to dream about it, OK to imagine just how February might feel. The Jets and the Giants have been that good this season. Good enough to make it possible. Good enough to make the ultimate dream seem a little more real.

Reach Sam Borden at sborden@lohud.com.