Tickets golden to see Giants in Super Bowl

Forget gold -- ticket prices to see the Giants take on the Patriots in Indianapolis Feb. 5 are spiraling off the charts. Even fans whose efforts to attend regular season games tend toward the obsessive are blinking -- almost.

"We're working on it," said John Bartlett of Levittown, who with his two sons drove to Green Bay (15 hours each way) in mid-January, then flew to San Francisco to see the Giants make it to the Super Bowl ($380 round-trip).

Prices for around 1,500 available tickets on the NFL Ticket Exchange website were priced from $2,613 to $17,048 each at midday Friday, with the high settling at $15,906 by 5 p.m.

Worse, he said, hotels within three hours of Indianapolis are sold out or priced into the stratosphere. (Travelocity found a Best Inn near the airport for $899 a night.)

But don't count Bartlett and other fans out just yet.

Mark Alagna, an electronics salesman from Ronkonkoma, said while he's been priced out of the official market, he and some friends still plan to travel to Indianapolis next week to see what might turn up. "You've got to have a laptop, a smartphone, and keep checking," he said of local ticket sellers. "I'm going to be in Indianapolis. You never give up hope."

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"I don't mind spending $1,500 per ticket," said Bartlett, who runs a heating and air-conditioning business, "but $2,600 is ridiculous. It's more than triple the face value."

A neighbor of Bartletts took the plunge and bought two tickets at $2,600 each, and told Bartlett he plans to drive out and sleep in his car, if he has to. There, Bartlett draws the line. "I'm not sleeping in my car."

Amanda Martocci, an agent at Big Blue Travel, a Manhattan agency that books packages to Giants games, said the company sold 500 packages to the game the Sunday the Giants won the NFC Championship -- some ordered from Candlestick Park. "There were people booking the trip from their phones in the parking lot," she said.