Jacob Fecura
With five seconds to go in the fourth quarter, Patriots golden boy, Tom Brady, heaves the ball up into the endzone to attemp to give his team another superbowl win. The leather ball spinning ever so softly through the air, which seemed like minutes, hours to Patriots and Giants fans, slowly came down into the endzone where somewhere around ten or twelve players from both teams attempted to retrieve the ball and bring the Lombardi trophy home to their respective towns and football organizations. The ball is tipped by a few players and for a second the ball looks to be caught by Patriots “Giant” tight end, Rob Gronkowski, but with a signal from the ref, their hopes were diminished and the Giants sprinted from the sideline and cheered with the rest of their fans, coaches, and fans worldwide because they were now the football champions of the world, and they in fact would be going to Disney World.
Throughout the game, the Patriots and Giants exchanged leads multiple times, in a game that would in fact go down to the wire. Starting the scoring out was the Giants, who on the first play of the Patriots first drive, forced Tom Brady to through the ball to the middle of nowhere in the back of the endzone which resulted in a safety and a Giants two points. The Giants then went on to score with a nice two yard pass from Manning to Victor Cruz in the middle of the endzone. The Patriots however, said enough was enough and went on to score 10 unanswered points to close out the first half, with a field goal from Gostkowski and a four yard Danny Woodhead reception from Brady. After a few Lawerence Tynes field goals and a Aaron Hernandez touchdown, Ahmad Bradshaw capped off the Giants victory slowly crossing the endzone with under a minute to play, almost stopping on the half yard line to expire some more time. However it would be enough for the Giants as the Patriots offense could not contribute another score to defeat the Giants.
A key factor in this game could have been the lack of Rob Gronkowski who only had two receptions for 26 yards, this was due to the left ankle injury he sustained in the AFC championship against the Baltimore Ravens two weeks ago. Maybe a healthy Gronk would have caused a different outcome, a positive one for the Patriots. Manning who went 30 for 40 with 296 yards and a Touchdown was awarded the MVP of the game, and probably wouldn’t have done it without the spectacular sideline catch by Mario Manningham.
This superbowl was one for the ages, and was expected by many people to have a similar outcome of the previous 2008 superbowl where the Giants also won, maybe in another four years we can see another rematch of this superbowl.