CR Does Sports: Celebrating the Giants Super Bowl Victory

SPECIAL TO CONFLICT REVOLUTION: It was a Super Monday for Matt Buccelli and Stephen Siena. As previously noted, the authors of this blog have found a way to reconcile their many political differences through mutual fanhood of the New York Football Giants - for a whole year, the Giants are now champions of the football universe. Read our thoughts on our moment of sporting glory below.

Posted by Matt (2/6/12):

It's a pretty remarkable feeling when one of your favorite sports teams wins a championship. That may sound obvious, but so does saying it would be great to spend a week in Tahiti. That doesn't make it any easier to articulate or imagine until you're actually there.

Everything is better when your team wins. Your clothes look nicer, your shoes more expensive. The crowded bus you normally ride to work is empty for some reason. The person behind the counter at your go-to breakfast place puts butter instead of cream cheese on your bagel - normally a massive faux pas - and you shrug it off and tip her anyway. You come home to a house full of empty beer cans and rearranged furniture from your Super Bowl party, and you don't really mind cleaning it up.

More Super Bowl reaction after the jump...



For those who would criticize me for hamming this up: I like a pro basketball team (the Knicks) that hasn't won since 1973 and just finished a decade as the laughingstock of the NBA. I am a diehard fan of a baseball team (the Mets) that also hasn't won since before I was born, just lost its best player to free agency and its money to Bernie Madoff, and will probably never escape the shadow of its crosstown rival. I don't really care that much about professional soccer, but I root for the United States in the World Cup (obviously), and any American knows what that's like. These Giants are pretty much all I've got right now, and while I appreciate that two titles in five years is more than some fans ever get to see, it's also all I've ever seen.

The sports punditocracy has rushed to compare this underdog Giants run to that magical pursuit back in 2007-2008 - from the confidence-boosting loss in the regular season to an undefeated team to the field goal to claim the NFC Championship in overtime, from the rematch with the Patriots in the Super Bowl to another crazy catch in the final minutes to win it. But this year was different. Particularly to the non-biased observer, 2008 had a mystical, almost fluke-like quality, right down to the helmet catch; those players earned it, but the criticism was always that the team had simply gotten lucky. While the Giants caught a few breaks this postseason, especially against San Francisco, there's no way anyone can make that argument now.

What we saw over the last month was a good team that deserved to be here, and knew it was better than everyone thought. They played with a collective confidence that was not only a joy but also inspiring to watch. They knew they could beat anyone, and they went out and did. Think about Eli Manning - he says he's an elite QB in the beginning of the year and gets widely criticized, so in order to prove it he has the best season of his career and then wins the Super Bowl MVP. That takes a quiet and mature sense of self-belief that was reflected in this entire Giants team.

As for me? After the Mets ripped my heart out in 2007 and blew a 7 game lead to the hated Philadelphia Phillies with just 17 games left in the season, I took solace in an article that tried to put the rollercoaster experience of being a sports fan in perspective. Blogging at the time for my local newspaper, I quoted the following:

You (blindly) invest your time, money, and faith in a group of men who don't know you from Adam, but you know way too much about them. And you support them. You support them with your money... with your time... and with your allegiance. You support them because you hope that one day they'll give you that feeling of exhilaration that makes you feel like you're actually one of them (source).

As sports fans, we go through a lot for that feeling, and in a sick, twisted, kind of way, it's more enjoyable the more we are forced to go through for it. But this is why we watch. So we can proudly and unabashedly live vicariously through our heroes - but also remember the childhood innocence with which we were introduced to sports, before we realized that we were just getting high off the triumphs of others. So that we can share these moments with the people close to us - or total strangers. So that Steve and I can finally agree on something.

In short, what's the point of watching sports if you're not going to celebrate when your team wins? Enjoy this one, Giants fans. We don't get a playoff bonus in our paychecks or a diamond-encrusted Super Bowl ring; we have to buy our commemorative Super Bowl gear. Our victory parties were not nearly as cool as the one for the real Giants. And we will never get to drive the sweet corvette that Eli Manning got for being Super Bowl MVP.

But we do have the feeling. I had a pretty awesome commute to work today. And although I did absolutely nothing to earn this on the field, I feel as though I could not have done more.