New York Magazine

So the Giants have returned from Indianapolis, landing at Newark Airport to a water cannon salute. And if you're curious what it looks like inside a football team's plane as it returns from a Super Bowl victory, linebacker Mark Herzlich has posted a video from the flight of running back Andre Brown leading the team in celebratory song. The lyrics: "I got a ring!" and "He got one, too!"

"But that appears to be the best-case scenario again: Sneaking into the playoffs as a Wild Card team, and, despite their underdog status, getting hot and going on a run. It worked for them once, but that's awfully hard to repeat."

We wrote that about the Giants on August 12 of last year, and we'll be damned if something pretty close to that scenario didn't play out. The Giants, of course, didn't make the playoffs as a Wild Card this season — the Eagles turned out to be something less than a Dream Team — but they clinched their playoff berth in Week 17, entered the postseason with some momentum, and simply won out. It's that last part — the winning out — that's so difficult. And yet, here we are. It's rather exciting, isn't it?

Somewhat incredibly, eleven men have quarterbacked their team to two Super Bowl victories. (Working from a sample size of 46 games, that sorta seems like a lot.) One of them is now Eli Manning. One of them is not Peyton Manning, Dan Marino, or Brett Favre. Manning is 31 years old and one of the five men to have won multiple Super Bowl MVP awards. It used to seem strange — as recently, honestly, as mid-December — that Eli Manning had once won a Super Bowl MVP. When will it stop feeling weird that he has two?

INDIANAPOLIS — Particularly in this instant-react, earth-is-being-live-tweeted culture, one always wants to be a bit hesitant to start proclaiming anything the best or worst anything. (Especially so soon after the event itself. Sometimes it's nice to actually experience things before putting them in perspective.) But still: That Super Bowl was rather awesome, wasn't it? But how awesome was it?

INDIANAPOLIS -- It is perhaps fitting, in a surreal, oh why not sort of way, that the game-winning touchdown in one of the pants-tighteningly tense Super Bowls of our lifetime featured a defense begging the opposing team to score and an offense desperately trying not to. Ahmad Bradshaw's six-yard touchdown "run" was accidental and insane and just perfect. It was sort of the athletic equivalent of putting opposite magnets next to each other. It looked like he had just been tased. And it will be the looniest, most beautiful highlight that Giants fans are going to watch for decades upon decades. The Giants have won the Super Bowl over the Patriots. Again.