Dean's World

Congratulations to the Giants and their fans. That was one heck of a game ending one heck of a season. RESPECT: The Giants earned it the hard way.

People are screaming on my block in New Jersey, just a few miles from Giants Stadium. Screaming.

I was driving home from Acme with some orange juice and, okay, I checked my BlackBerry one more time to see if the Giants could do the impossible... and they had.

And they did.

And if you don't see the human interest story -- the plain-vanilla, gets-no-respect coach... the overshadowed younger-brother quarterback... the team of no names picked for a .500 season and perhaps one playoff round right up through the late fall -- then you have no heart.

Now I regret going to bed early and not bothering to watch the end of the Super Bowl. What a dodge, what a throw, what a great catch!

We had the time of our lives last night. We were all part of a wave that picked up in the late afternoon and put us down around 1 am. My father, me, and my son--3 generations--had money on the Giants. My father is recovering from a very serious surgery at a hospital a few blocks away--I dropped my son off in his recovery room with 3 oranges, a bottle of water, a bagel, and a pack of depraved cupcakes from a bodega. I stayed through kickoff, then went my own way. My father said that the way they prolonged kickoff to accomodate commercials made him "ashamed to be an American."

I told V. I wanted to be at a very packed bar, any bar, and we found one within half a block. I enjoy the Superbowl the way a rat might enjoy the melted butter spraying over his head near the traveling amusement park's concession stand. I don't understand the game in the slightest but I take any opportunity to be around men acting like men without feminine interference: The way they all become a single vast organism, reacting in the same instant, the same way, leaping from their barstools and hollering and pumping their arms into the air, and high fiving. I hollered right along with them, in ignorance, and felt happy.

Everything about it kills me: The way they know what they're doing every second, they way they play so utterly together and the way they weave and spin this fantastic drama in front of our eyes--the unquestioned drama of the ball which may be the last American story. To my eye, it all looks like a crazy pile of men in helmets never really getting anywhere, but I follow the roars and when they catch the ball or drop it or run with it, I feel the thrill and I begin to grasp, little by little.

It's a story, football, told in a few hours, that picks you up, tosses you around, suspends you, slams you down, and finally gives you true catharsis.

We walked up Broadway and people were just screaming straight out. Leaning out of windows screaming and running up and down the street screaming. I screamed too. I didn't stop smiling all night. For once in my life I was "on" the winning team.

Vincent almost knocked my tooth out from flailing in laughter over the Doritos mouse commercial.

The Victoria's Secret commercial struck me as a bummer; It insinuated an end to the world of all men acting like men, and that was the very thing that I was having such a good time with. I have become convinced that women should have their worlds and men should have theirs. It all gets boring when it mixes too much. I was once at a neo-Orthodox Jewish wedding and they separated the men and women for dancing and I was in heaven. A few women complained and I told them they were crazy wrong. I pulled up a chair and watched as the charismatic young Rabbi started dancing right in front of me, for the men, not for me.

The world of men is a place of great beauty, clarity, conviction.

I am well aware that I can't touch it, can't join it, can't understand its laws or partake in them.

But I can watch, under cover of caring about the Superbowl, per se. I can love the sight and sound of all those thundering hooves across the plains, the dust, the hunt, the importance of the kill. I can know, once in a while, that I am utterly insignificant, that it is time to stand back and just watch a group of creatures acting natural. There will always be beauty in that, as there was last night.

Tomorrow I am actually getting on the 1 train and going all the way downtown to join the Victory parade--pretending to be a very advanced Giants fan.