Giants get the last laugh

We laughed. We rolled our eyes. We shook our heads.

We did all that when general manager Jerry Reese, defending his lack of moves in the preseason, said the Giants just needed to make a few plays in the 2011 season, get themselves into the tournament and then make a run for the Super Bowl.

When Eli Manning dared to place himself in the same company as the great Tom Brady, winner of three Super Bowls, and said he considered himself an "elite" quarterback. When Antrel Rolle guaranteed that the team, floundering through a four-game losing streak, would make it to the postseason.

But somehow they knew what the rest of the world soon would come to realize. That you can't build a championship team on paper and simply hand in the roster for consideration. That there will be as many downs as there are ups in a 16-game schedule, but it's about playing your best football at the end. And that cloaked beneath a 9-7 regular-season record, hidden beneath a series of embarrassing home losses to inferior teams such as the Seahawks and the Redskins, blurred by the noise surrounding the job status of a coach who appeared to be on the hot seat, the Giants quietly were turning themselves into the best team in football.

It was far from a perfect season, but it came with a perfect ending.

The Giants beat the Patriots in Super Bowl XLVI, but perhaps the first true glimpse of the team's capabilities came against the Patriots in a visit to Foxboro in early November. Playing in that game without their leading receiver and leading rusher, the Giants still managed to beat New England -- in a game that featured three lead changes in the final 3:03 -- and improve to 6-2 halfway through the season.

The players were so excited by the victory that they hoisted Tom Coughlin in the air in the postgame locker room. Soon, though, that euphoria would be tested. The Giants would lose their next four games, three of them heart-breakers and one of them a blowout in New Orleans. The final loss, however, started to feel a little like a win when they played the undefeated Packers close and lost on a last-second field goal at MetLife Stadium.

After a win over the Cowboys, the Giants hit rock bottom with a home loss to the Redskins. The defeat dropped their record to 7-7 and meant they had to win out against two of their biggest rivals -- the Jets and the Cowboys -- just to make the playoffs.

It was after that Redskins loss that the Giants' attitude toward the season changed. They were "all in." Practices became crisper, more energized. Games were played with more urgency, more attention to detail.

Coughlin met with the team after that Redskins loss, but he didn't chew them out or harp on their mistakes. Instead, he focused them on what was ahead. A must-win game that begat another. And another. And another. Until all of a sudden, the team that one national broadcaster thought was so done that we should "stick a fork in" them had knifed all the way to the Super Bowl.

In Indianapolis -- the city where his older brother had become an NFL legend but had won only one Super Bowl title -- Eli Manning led a game-winning drive with such confidence and command that no one could argue his status among the game's top quarterbacks. And it was the rushing game -- the one that finished dead last in the NFL in yardage during the regular season -- that scored the go-ahead touchdown (albeit without much resistance from the Patriots).

And when Tom Brady threw the final pass of the season into the end zone, there were three defenders in place to knock it down and begin the celebration that continues Sunday, a full week later.

Some of us still laugh, roll our eyes, shake our heads. But now the impetus to do that is the improbable string of events that brought the Giants their fourth Super Bowl title and second in five seasons. Next time Manning, Reese or Rolle say something, perhaps we'll listen more carefully.