IT’S been a good time to be a Giants fan, because when you’re a fan there’s nothing better than a playoff week. Fans have been at this a lot longer than the players they root for. You know how veteran players always look back wistfully, how if they knew then what they know now, they’d have learned to appreciate things more?
Fans never need that lecture. They know.
“It’s only been three years,” Larry Smithson was saying yesterday morning. “I know this isn’t what you call a drought. Hell, when I was growing up, the Giants never made the playoffs, and I mean ever. I think I remember all those years whenever I get a team like this year. You never want to take the playoffs for granted.”
Smithson was wandering the aisles of the Mets Clubhouse Store on 42nd Street, thinking about picking out a new No. 15 Beltran jersey for his godson.
“His father ain’t raising him right,” Smithson said with a laugh. “Me, I’m Yankees-Giants all the way. He’s coming up Jets-Mets. Poor kid.”
Smithson vividly remembers the black hole the Giants fell into from 1964 through 1980, 17 straight playoff-free seasons that tried the patience of even the bluest Big Blue backer. He was born in 1959, so he only vaguely remembers the Bears-Giants title game of ’63, and by the time the Giants started winning big in the mid-’80s he was too consumed with his Wall Street career to enjoy it as much as he would have liked.
So, mostly, what he remembers are 17 years and two winning seasons, and private planes flying banners in the Jersey sky, about 15 years of lousy football and having enough of that. In that way, the biggest and best Giants fans are like a whole generation of Americans who survived the Great Depression. They are grateful for the prosperous times. But they still remember what it was like to go to bed wanting, too.
“I remembered to enjoy every second of the last playoff game,” Smithson said. “Until the end. That was sickening.”
The end came in a blurry haze three Januarys ago, in the loud sunshine of a San Francisco Sunday, when the 49ers came back on the Giants, when 24 points up became one point down in what felt like 17 seconds, when the whole season came down to one final snap, and that snap skidded across the turf like a rock skimming across a pond.
The Giants were devastated by that loss. But they also figured to have plenty of opportunities for redemption.
“We’re gonna be back next year,” Tiki Barber said in the quiet of the postgame locker room. “And we’ll get it right.”
Kerry Collins said, “The great thing about this game is that there’s always next year.”
There was no “next year,” and although Collins couldn’t have known it, there already was a clock ticking over him. As close as the Giants were to blowing the Niners out of Candlestick Park that day, they tumbled just as far, just as fast, as the Jets did in the past year.
It happens that way in the NFL. You sniff the Super Bowl one year, you lick your wounds the next. You make playoff plans one minute, you call a press conference announcing a new coach the next. And you never appreciate the good times as much as you should.
The Giants, man for man, would tell you no matter what happens, they’ll be back next year, and the year after, don’t worry about them. Maybe they’re right. But you know better. You know enough to be grateful for what you get tomorrow. You never can tell when you’ll get another day quite like it.