We consider the immediate rewards for the Super Bowl principals, having had time to digest the events of Sunday last, and notice that the victims, those pale young scouts from Denver, were embraced by the homefolks as if they had returned to the Rocky Mountains with Lawrence Taylor`s skivvies on a stick.
Two time zones away the winners were waiting for snow blowers to clear a path for their celebration, which would be sort of a sitdown thank you in the New York Giants` home stadium by the grateful citizens of New Jersey.
We do not question how heartfelt this must be, but it is not the way we are used to seeing New York heroes honored. It is the fate of these hybrid Giants to be the first New York team not to be showered by ticker tape, which was the debris of affection long before Gatorade.
It was the wish of Ed Koch, the mayor of their namesake city, that the Giants be ignored east of the Hudson River, a point he reinforced by distancing himself even farther eastward on Super Sunday, taking in the sights of Poland, a country of much charm but of limited football pedigree, sort of the Tampa Bay of Europe.
Koch reluctantly agreed to allow a parade if a credit card company picked up the tab, but no one was going to make him watch.
In Denver joy and forgiveness were not disputed. Affection so soaked the Broncos that their owner, the Canadian cyclist Patrick Bowlen, felt it necessary to borrow from a U.S. Army general.
”We`ll return,” he shouted. ”We`ll be back. You`ll have your world championship. I promise you that.”
Of course, that is not the way the question is asked. What we want to know is not if the Broncos will do it right the next time, or even ever again, any more than we are curious to see the Vikings go five-for-five in Super Bowl losses.
What we are required to determine is if the Giants are football`s next dynasty.
”We`re young enough and good enough,” coach Bill Parcells said. ”If we don`t get big-headed . . .”
Parcells, that old worrywart and fourth-down gambler, will go no further. He knows exactly where his Giants fit among the teams of the ages.
”One of the great teams of 1986,” Parcells insisted without equivocation, ignoring completely the Jersey Dynasty`s glorious dash into 1987.
One of the required rituals of grand achievement is the dare to do it again, just as the Bears were teased by talk of dynasty, and the 49ers before them and the Raiders before them.
The Super Bowl has been around long enough to make single Super Bowl winners ordinary the day after they became immortal.
Parcells, bless him, was not falling into the trap set by the expectations of strangers.
”I don`t know,” Parcells said. ”All I know is no one can say we couldn`t do it, `cause we did it.”
The truth is that only one team could have stopped the Giants from doing it and that was the Bears, the Bears of 1985 or the Bears of `86 with a quarterback.
Alas, we will never know how that might have been, any more than we can know how these Giants, or last year`s Bears, would fare against the Steeler dynasty, the Dolphins, the former Cowboys or any team already authenticated by history.
”History,” said Parcells, having no reason to prove it otherwise, ”is baloney.”
