So this is how the damn story of NFC East 2020 ends:
The Giants take one of their fiercest rivals, getting a 23-19 victory over the ugly Cowboys. Against every fiber of their being, against every thread of their soul in shades of blue, they praised their football season to the Eagles, who, if not 1A on the list of the most sought after Giants fans, are definitely 1B.
But they needed the Eagles to beat 1C – the Washington Football Team.
“I won’t be caught dead in an Eagles hat,” Giants receiver Sterling Shepard had said around 5 o’clock, “but I’ll be rooted for them.”
And yet who in their right mind might know that 6 and a half hours later, the Eagles – who, let’s be honest, over the years, probably inspired more tantrums from Giants fans than Cowboys and WFT combined – he would become even more hated, more offended, more hated, more despised than ever.
First, down by three points in the third quarter, Eagles coach Doug Pederson avoided a goal on the field, which equalized the game, for the fourth and goal of the four.
Then he scored.
Not really. But instead of watching his intriguing young defender Jalen Hurts react to the fourth-quarter game of a significant game – significant for the WFT, anyway – he brought in his third-string defender, his teammate Nate. Südfeld.
If you had never heard of Nate Sudfeld, you would not have been alone.
But for now, his name will come out of the language here: Nate # @ # $ & # Sudfeld.
Sudfeld did what you would imagine Sudfeld would do. He threw a choice. He hit the ball. He looked just as unprofessional, with 26 attempts to get his career under his belt. The Eagles took a knee with a full quarter for the final. Washington won the game, 20-14, and NFC East with a record of 7-9, and host Tom Brady next week.
Giants?
Look, they had 16 weeks before he made sure I could finish more than 6-10. Outside of New York, there will be few tears shed for them. And look: it’s not the Eagles to make the Giants feel good about themselves. Simply not.
Yet …
“Why isn’t Jalen Hurts at stake on God’s green earth?” wrote on Twitter Darius Slayton.
Golden Tate tweeted: “I think the Eagles just hate us more than Washington.”
And Blake Martinez: “……”
It was quite strange how the Giants’ own game ended, with a football on the ground, with a season reduced to the random bounces of an elongated brown racket. Of course, that game couldn’t end normally, just as the season would never end normally, this season of the Giants, which had the impression that about five different seasons turned into one.
Wayne Gallman made a splendid play, passing the first mark down, and that should have been the game, set, match and allow the Giants to sneak into their Eagles socks for a few hours.
Of course it wasn’t possible. Of course, the ball slipped out of Gallman’s hands and landed on the turf, and even though it looked like Gallman had landed on the ball – landed on his bottom (Of course!) – there was a particularly nervous moment when one official pointed out that it was talking about the Giants ball and another said it is the Cowboys ball.
“I wanted to slap Wayne in the back of the head because he fumbled,” Giants safety Logan Ryan said a little later, “but he got the ball back.”
“I’m sorry I caused so much drama,” Gallman said.
Drama?
He had no idea what kind of drama was coming.
When these giants were 0-5 and 1-7, they would all have offered their kingdom for a good drama, for a drama that would define the season, as opposed to the “will-darkness-ever-dissipated” drama that followed. this season. Drama? After a terrible start, after a sublime medium, after a brutal week of a few weeks, they could endure a little more drama.
And he would tolerate the drama to come, once he had handled the end of the Sunday afternoon fair. They fired the Cowboys, and while coach Joe Judge and most of the Giants didn’t live with the shadow of the Damned Star as long as everyone else in the organization did, that made it a little sweeter.
“There were a lot of smiles and hugs – socially distant hugs – in the locker room after that,” the judge said, and you have to believe that the loudest and happiest of the greeters was John Mara, the co-owner of the Giants, who lived died with these Giants-Cowboys games for a better period of 60 years.
“I came today and had a significant game,” the judge said, “and the boys did business.”
They did business and then had to wait. And you probably wouldn’t have believed it if you had told them how everything would turn out at the end of that wait. Because how could he? How could anyone?