Late Night

A few months ago I started working nights. I go into the office every Sunday around 6ish and I work until 5AM Monday morning. I do that all week until 5AM Friday morning when my weekend starts. It has its good and bads, but for the most part the hours suck. The worst part is on those Fridays or Saturdays that I don't go out, I usually can't fall asleep before 2 or 3 AM. I have tried a few different things to try and fix this, but nothing really works. The bottom line is that five days a week I am awake all night, and it is not really possible to then function as a normal human being on the weekends. In reality it would take a couple weeks to get myself have on a normal schedule. In any event, I was just tossing and turning in bed and I thought, why not use this time to do something that I enjoy. So, here I am writing on this blog once again. Here I go..

Training camp for the 2008 NFL season started a couple weeks ago, so we now can officially put Super Bowl XLII in our rearview mirror. I was not writing when the Giants were making their run, so I missed the chance to express how amazing that was for me. I really never had one of my teams win a championship before. The Rangers won in 1994, but hockey was never as important to me as the other sports and I was only 11. Any championship would have been awesome for me, but this run by the Giants was as good as it gets. There is no reason to go over the specifics, as everyone knows what happen. All I know though is as it was going on, I kept on thinking to myself that it will never get better than this. I will never see my team go on a run so unexpected, and so pure as I did last January.

One of the reasons that it was so special personally was my friend David who I have mentioned before here. He passed away about a year ago. He introduced me to sports and more specifically, to the Giants. I remember watching the Giants play the Rams at home in the 1989 playoffs with him (they lost in OT on a long TD catch by Flipper Anderson). The first Super Bowl I remember watching was at his apartment, when Montana brought the Niners back against Cincinnati. I remember the Giants playing the Niners on Monday Night Football when they were both 10-1 in 1990, which at the time felt the biggest game ever. I remember him talking about the Giants being bad for so many years in the 60's and 70's. How he suffered for so long and Parcells brought them back. He was the guy I called when the Giants blew the playoff game to the Niners in January 2003. He was who I called for everything sports-related.

I also remember him passing last summer and how tough it was for me. Tougher than I ever could imagine. I missed him so much and I felt like I had no one who I could talk to or relate to on it. Every time I watched a game I thought about him. It just so happens that September the Mets went through a historic collapse where they blew something like a 7 game lead with 17 games to go in the season. Not having him there to talk to about it made it that much tougher. When the Giants season started, all I hoped was for them to have a great season for him. They started out 0-2, and could not have looked worse. They began to turn it around after beating Washington on the road with an unbelievable late game defensive stand, but the rest of the regular season was a bit of a roller coaster with them finishing 10-6 and in the playoffs for a 3rd straight year.

I never remember David going to a Giants game. I also never heard him trash Eli, when it seemed like the whole city was. He was as loyal a Giant fan as they come. When I ran the NYC marathon for him last November, the first thing I did when I finished was put on a brand new Giants sweatshirt in tribute to him.

The playoffs were an amazing run, but all I kept wishing was that I could have watched those games with him. I want to think that he saw those games somewhere and it made him feel as happy as it made me feel. Over the past year, I have been able to grieve and through that I have felt better. Every year around this time thought I can't help but think of him. The optimism of training camp. Reading a story in the paper everyday about a rookie, or a position battle, or a player who looks like he may have a breakout year. That is what David was all about. The hope of a new season. I know that there is nothing that the Giants can do this season to top what happened last year. So all I would say to them is not to try to. Play hard, and know that fans like me will never forget what they gave us one short year ago. To David, I would say I miss you, and I hope that you are able to watch somewhere because these Giants just might shock us again this year.