Hope Is A Good Thing: Remembering To Believe In The 2011 Giants

Many forget how hopeless the Giants looked at this point of the 2007 season.

It's a tough time to be a Giant fan.  Unfortunately, everything that concerned me about New York's Monday Night game against the Saints held true.  Big Blue's defense was barely a speed bump for Drew Brees, who gleefully exploited the middle of the field with Jimmy Graham and Lance Moore.  The 577 yards the Giants surrendered were the second highest total in their 87-year history.  With the hardest schedule in the league remaining, a second-half collapse seems inevitable.

What concerned me wasn't that the Giants lost as much as how they lost.  Justin Tuck and company had visibly given up late in the game, and that was no more apparent than on Mark Ingram's 35-yard touchdown jaunt in the final minute.  The players had quit on themselves.  Judging by my Twitter feed after the game, most fans had quit on them too.  And yet, as bad as it looks right now, there's still room for hope.  The great thing about being a longtime fan is, if you look hard enough, you can always find a reason to believe.  Let's take a walk down memory lane.

Eleven years ago, at this exact point of the season, the Giants turned the ball over four times in a depressing home loss to Charlie Batch and the Detroit Lions.  Amid an uproar from the media and fans, coach Jim Fassel shoved his "chips to the middle of the table" and guaranteed they would make the playoffs. They won five straight and clinched the best record in the NFC en route to the Super Bowl.

Exactly two years later, I was on a Greyhound bus listening to a play-by-play of Steve McNair's last-minute comeback and overtime victory against a hapless Giants defense in the Meadowlands.  I remember the hopelessness I felt for the rest of that four-hour ride back to Boston.  For the first time ever, I considered not watching New York's next game.  I'm glad I did, because four straight wins later, the Giants were once again in the playoffs.

Finally, no chronicle of late-season Giant runs would be complete without mentioning 2007.  This week four years ago, Eli Manning had just solidified his "bust" status by throwing four interceptions, three of them returned for touchdowns, against the Minnesota Vikings. At that moment, you couldn't have found a single person in the Tri-State Area that would have bet on the Giants winning the Super Bowl.  They'd lost to the Packers and twice to the Cowboys by a combined score of 68-111, and the 11-0 Patriots looked like the best team in NFL history.  You don't need me to tell you how they fared against those teams in the postseason.

When you follow a team for long enough, you're inevitably haunted by the failures of years past.  I'll never trust a 5-0 start after 2009, and I'll never relax with a 21-point lead after last year's Eagles game.  But if you're lucky enough, along the way, your team will also give you enough reasons to hope.  Smart money says that the injuries are too mountainous and the schedule is too arduous for the Giants to avoid their third consecutive second-half collapse.  But they've overcome odds like this before.  When given the choice between quitting and hoping, I'd rather believe.

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Image found here.