In any Giant challenge, tough way is the Mara way
January 6
New York Daily News
"In another time, in another year, maybe even with another Giants team trying to be the first in the team's rich history to repeat as champs, this would have been about Wellington Mara. It would have been about the old man, would have been about all the other big games, the ones the Giants won and the ones they lost, because the old man saw all of them, all the way back to the first title in 1927. It was like talking to Yogi about the Yankees.
No one would have loved the last Super Bowl, Super Bowl No. 42, Charlie Conerly's number, as much as he would have. No one would have understood it better. And no one would have deserved it more.
But Mr. Mara did not live long enough to see the greatest Giants victory of them all last February, the end of the greatest Super Bowl run any team in history ever made, at Tampa and at Dallas and at Lambeau Field and finally in Glendale, Ariz., against 18-0. So this is about John Mara instead, the son who runs the Mara side of the Giants, the son who has seen plenty of Giants football himself.
The feeling for the Giants is as deep as anything we have in sports here, and that includes the Yankees. Now as the Giants get ready to play their first playoff game this season against the Eagles on Sunday, John Mara and the rest of us get ready to see if the Giants really do have enough game to do it again.
They don't just feel like the defending champs of the NFL right now. Even without Plaxico Burress, such a big player in all ways last season, especially in January and February, they feel like the heavyweight champ of pro sports. The team to beat. The last time the Giants came into the playoffs as the team to beat was the first time Bill Parcells won it all.
Mara was asked Monday, as the week of another Giants-Eagles game began to slowly turn like some big old wheel, how much time he feels has passed since Eli threw it to Plax in Glendale.
"To tell you the truth," he said, "it actually seems like a long time ago now. It just feels like so much has happened since, not just the regular season. There was the Burress thing, there were all the stadium issues we've had, there was even everything that happened with the economy. After the most amazing Super Bowl, it's been a pretty amazing year."
John Mara, the Giants fan in him coming out now, paused and said, "But it does feel sometimes like it happened a lifetime ago."
Then he said, "Here we go again, trying to do it again.""
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