Big Blue fans trapped in Patriots nation

John Farrell grew up in Bedford, Mass., and is a lifelong Giants fan. What else would he be?

"We were all Giants fans," he said.

Wait: ALL Giants fans, deep in the heart of New England?

It's a strange-but-true wrinkle in the history of the teams that will meet in Super Bowl XLVI, one that has left many Big Blue loyalists pinned deep behind enemy lines.

Take Matt Pictou, who grew up in Biddeford, Maine, and now lives in the Boston area. He is a Giants die-hard, just like his father before him, and just as he is grooming his toddler son to be.

"My household was a Giants household, just bleeding Giants blue," he said.

This requires some explaining. Unlike the Yankees, who have been almost uniformly loathed north of New Haven for decades, the Giants were New England's football team by default for many years. They even played their home games at the Yale Bowl in 1973-74 while waiting for Giants Stadium to be completed.

From the time the peculiarly named Boston Yanks left the NFL after 1948 until the Boston Patriots joined the new AFL in 1960, pro football fans in the extreme Northeast gravitated toward the glamorous Giants of that era.

Even after the Patriots came along, they were an afterthought. "No one took them seriously," said Farrell, who attended some of their games with friends for 50 cents. "We thought the whole thing was a joke."

Net result: Many New Englanders now over 50 became and remain Giants fans. Many of their children followed suit.

Farrell, 61, and Pictou, 36, are good examples. The former adopted the Giants as a child and never let go. The latter had them bequeathed by his late father, Frank, a native of Nova Scotia who fell for the sport and team.

"He basically said the Patriots weren't around here, and by the time they did come around, they were insignificant anyway,'' Pictou said.

Even by the ragged standards of the AFL, the Patriots were a wayward outfit, struggling merely to find a consistent, appropriate place to play.

Their home stadiums included Boston University, Fenway Park, Boston College and Harvard Stadium, where they first met the Giants in the regular season in 1970. (The teams' next game was at the Yale Bowl in '74, so they played twice in Ivy League stadiums before their first pro facility.)

It gets more complicated.

In October 1967, the Pats played a "home" game in San Diego because Fenway was busy with the World Series. And on Sept. 22, 1968, they "hosted" the eventual Super Bowl champion Jets -- in Birmingham, Ala.

The unusual venue was designed in part to explore a new location for the franchise, in part to cash in on the box office appeal of Jets (and former Alabama) quarterback Joe Namath. The Jets won, 47-31, before a pro-Jets crowd at Legion Field.

After '74, the Giants and Pats didn't play again until 1987 in a regular-season series that New England leads 5-4. In 1996, the Giants blew a 22-3 fourth-quarter lead at home and lost to Bill Parcells' Patriots, 23-22, in Dan Reeves' final game as coach.

But the rivalry truly arrived four seasons ago with the Patriots' 38-35 victory at Giants Stadium to complete a 16-0 regular season, followed by a bit of a surprise five weeks later in Super Bowl XLII.

When the teams meet again in the big game, the line that clearly defines Yankees and Red Sox territory will remain blurred by history. "I don't have recollections of people rooting for anybody but the Giants," said Farrell, who now lives in Denville, N.J. "Maybe some kids on the block were Packers fans. The old-school guys thought the AFL was minor league."

Farrell rooted against the Jets in Super Bowl III, figuring the Colts would defend the honor of the NFL. "The upstarts were fun to watch, but they were not going to take over from the NFL," he said. "We were stunned."

Pictou is not old enough to remember the pre-Pats days. But he does recall their dreary early-1990s period. The year the 1990 Giants won the Super Bowl, the Patriots finished 1-15.

Now that both teams are consistent winners, Pictou finds himself "on an island" among friends. "I feel like people my age who are Patriots fans are spoiled," he said. "They have a sense of entitlement where it's 'we expect to be in the Super Bowl, and we believe Brady and Belichick are gods.' "

Being in that environment has given Pictou a sense of how Patriots fans feel when they look back to four Februarys ago, and what revenge next Sunday would mean.

"Everybody up here understands what was ripped away from them back in '07," he said. "Truly, the Patriots would have been recognized as the greatest football team to ever grace the field. They know exactly what was ripped out of their hands."