It was a lovely, balmy late-fall afternoon. The low sun betrayed the warmth's incongruence for the time of year, and warned of the inevitable approach of winter. It was a lovely day to be alive, a lovely day to be outside and not watching your two-win football team. It was a day instead to bike a couple of loops of the park, which was itself an excuse to be near the fruit stand selling the apple cider slushie your friend has raved about but which you haven't yet tried. That such things can exist make you feel a little warmer about the human experiment. You must have it, and joy, too. Sampling an ambrosial concoction, or devoting a few hours of one limited life to the New York Giants—not a difficult choice in my book.
By the time I reached where the fruit stand was supposed to be, with the sun starting to sink over the borough and the bay, it was gone—for the day or for the year, I did not know. No cider slushie. I rode home, and immediately put on my television, even before taking off my shoes, because I knew the Giants were winning, and the game was far along, and I deserved at least that consolation after having lost out on my frozen grail.
Here is roughly where I came in:
It had been 19-0. "We were fucking killing them," said New York cornerback Dru Phillips. I was pleased, the Giants were confident, and Brian Daboll had job security. We all proved very foolish to think so.
By scoring 33 points in the fourth quarter—the most any team has scored in 15 years—and, more amazingly, doing it after being shut out over the first three quarters, the Broncos pulled off an improbable, last-second 33-32 win. They deserve plenty of credit for the comeback. Bo Nix deserves credit, rushing for two touchdowns and throwing for two more, on his last four complete drives. The Broncos won, and they deserved to. And yet, I can say with some confidence, the Giants have an organizational knack for finding new ways to lose football games.
"I lost hope, I ain’t gonna lie. I lost hope," Broncos CB Patrick Surtain II said, and he had been right to despair. The cold, clear facts of past experience demanded it. NFL teams had won 1,602 straight games when leading by 18 points in the final six minutes of a game, Kevin Harlan told us. NFL teams had never lost a game when leading by that much and shutting out their opponents.
Like most miracles, this comeback was made possible by a confluence of small things. If the Giants hadn't committed pass interference to give the Broncos new life on fourth down with six minutes left and the score still a laughable 26-8, nobody would even dream that things could've ever gone the way they did. But Denver's second chance was just about the moment when the field tilted. The Broncos scored, and Jaxson Dart, so good in this game to that point, tossed a pick on the third play of the next drive; Harlan yelled the word "disaster" and Denver found the end zone in 56 seconds. Another Giants three-and-out, and Denver scored again, this time in 51 seconds, to take a 30-26 lead.
There was still time, and the Giants, bailed out by a couple of penalties, retook the lead with a measly 37 seconds remaining. It seemed like disaster could be averted—as if, on my dejected way home, I had accidentally stumbled across another vendor selling a cider slushie. Grandmothers, bicycles, etc. It didn't happen. Denver didn't even need a particularly long kick.
Lots of shell-shocked faces on the Giants' sideline, but what more was there to say? "Not a lot of talking that needs to be done when you lose a game like that," Daboll said. Plenty of yelling, though, from Daboll at his defensive coordinator. And players cursing in the tunnel and crying in the locker room. It's almost enough to make you forget about two missed extra points. I'll say this about the Giants: When it's required to lose a game, they put the full team effort into it.
I'm getting better at processing games like these. You think this is my first tour of duty in Shitworld? In the NFL over the last 20 years, only six times has a team lost a game it was leading by at least 19 points. Three of those teams were the Giants. I never got my slushie, either.
