Sports
New York, New England, New Game: Brady and Belichick look to solidify their names in history
By Steve LaRochelle '14, Sports Staff Writer
February 2, 2012
The Patriots players and coaches insist that the upcoming Super Bowl rematch with the Giants isn’t personal.
Only 10 players from the 2007 debacle remain on the Patriots roster, Tom Brady was quick to point out at media day. Coach Belichick, famous for his stoic and detached persona before the press, has been uncharacteristically sociable this week. Some have even described him as downright “giddy.”
Still, Belichick isn’t Rex Ryan. He wont be making any public declarations of “revenge.” He’ll leave that to the Patriots faithful, who—like me—have nothing but revenge on their minds.
How could we not? The Super Bowl XLII loss was humiliating. The 19-0 t-shirts were already printed. The press had already declared us the best NFL team of all-time. We had surpassed the ’72 Dolphins and demolished the ’85 Bears. Eli Manning was still the third best quarterback in his own family. Tom Brady had earned every record in the book.
Then David Tyree caught a hail mary with his face mask, and everything changed forever.
For New Englanders, it is personal. The Giants conjure up every hateful feeling we have towards New York sports. An Eli Manning jersey might as well be a Derek Jeter jersey. A Super Bowl XVI championship t-shirt might as well be one of those obnoxious “27-time world champion” Yankees shirts. It’s all the same. Same city, same fans.
This isn’t just one football game. It’s the next chapter in a perpetual battle for regional supremacy.
I grew up in central Connecticut. Ignorant New Yorkers think that means my New England loyalties are artificial. They think all Connecticutians wish they lived in New York, and their geographical understanding doesn’t extend much past Greenwich. They don’t realize that I live fifteen minutes from the Massachusetts border, just an hour and a half outside of Boston.
If the geography of the Boston-New York rivalry mirrored that of the American Civil War, central Connecticut would be Antietam Creek. Stuck in the middle, allegiances questioned, the people on the borders have to choose sides. It was easy to pick the Confederacy if you lived in Mississippi just like it’s easy to support the Giants if you live in Manhattan. In central Connecticut, we choose alliances knowing fully well that 50 percent of our peers will be our rivals.
So it is at Hamilton, where New England fans live among their enemies. We know them, we work with them, we go to school with them. It makes us despise them more virulently.
This isn’t just one football game.
It’s a game to cement Bill Belichick’s legacy as the greatest coach of all time. Everyone will know he’s the best when he wins his fourth Super Bowl, this time with maybe the worst defense in the NFL. It’s a game that could place Tom Brady well beyond any of his contemporary quarterbacks, into a four Super Bowl stratosphere occupied only by Joe Montana and Terry Bradshaw.
The stakes are high because the costs of a loss may be greater than the benefits of a win. If Tom Brady loses, he falls to 3-2 in the big game. He falls to an embarrassing 0-2 against Eli Manning. The story of the 21st century becomes the improbably victories of the Giants. Tom Brady’s story becomes more about what “could have been” than what actually was. His three championships in 2001, 2003 and 2004 would become frozen in time as a part of a history already written.
This isn’t just one football game. It is a game to keep the book open on the history of the Patriots dynasty. If we lose to the Giants again, the ink may just dry up for good.
And we’ll have to deal with all the gloating New Yorkers. What could be worse?