The team I grew up waiting for.

The rise of the 1986 Giants belongs to my high-school years. From ’83 through ’86, I was getting on that bus with all the arguments that came with being a Giants fan. Eagles fans. Jets fans. Everybody with something to say.

I had been taking that shit for years. You don’t forget what it feels like when your team finally gives you something back.

We watched them become good. Then really good. Then the team nobody wanted to play.

The championship season was 1986. The Super Bowl came the following January, when I was a senior in high school. When I think about that team, I carry the whole climb with it. The bus, the waiting, the pride. This one reaches a part of me that a score alone can’t explain.

We watched it happen.

Bill Parcells went 3–12–1 in his first season in 1983. There was no guarantee he would get enough time to turn the thing around. Then came 9–7 in 1984, 10–6 in 1985, and 14–2 in 1986.

Those numbers cover my high-school years. I didn’t know the ending while we were living through them.

My Aunt Eleanor got me into the home playoff win over San Francisco on December 29, 1985. Seventeen to three against the defending champions. I was there for that step forward. She made that memory possible, along with a lot of others I still carry.

The playoff losses taught us where the standard was. San Francisco ended the 1984 run. Chicago shut us out after the 1985 season. Both went on to win the Super Bowl. The Giants were getting closer, but closer still meant watching somebody else finish the job.

In 1986, Lawrence Taylor had 20.5 sacks and won the league MVP. Joe Morris rushed for 1,516 yards. Phil Simms had an offense he could run with authority. Mark Bavaro looked like he considered being tackled an unreasonable request.

Harry Carson. Carl Banks. Gary Reasons. Leonard Marshall. Jim Burt. George Martin. You can start naming the defense and feel your expectations changing before you get through the list.

Fourth and seventeen. I knew.

November 16 in Minnesota. The Giants were behind 20–19 and needed seventeen yards on fourth down. Simms found Bobby Johnson for twenty-two. Raul Allegre finished the drive with a 33-yard field goal. Giants, 22–20.

I had grown up watching Dallas, Pittsburgh, and Oakland make plays like that. The game looked lost, then their quarterback did something and suddenly it wasn’t. I had spent enough time watching that happen for other people’s teams.

Now Phil Simms was doing it for ours. I knew. I knew we could win the Super Bowl. Fourth-and-seventeen is still where I go when somebody asks when that team became different for me.

That Minnesota game deserves its own story.

Bavaro kept going. So did we.

Two weeks later, on December 1, San Francisco had us down 17–0 at halftime. Then came Bavaro carrying defenders on a 31-yard catch and run, with Ronnie Lott among the men trying to get him down.

The Giants scored twenty-one points in the third quarter and won 21–17. Simms and that offense could bring us back. Bavaro could make a play look like an argument he had no intention of ending.

That is another game I fucking love. The whole comeback belongs beside the famous catch. These were the afternoons and nights that made the championship feel possible before it happened.

Now you have to deal with us.

Jerry Rice had a chance early in the San Francisco playoff game. I remembered it as a dropped touchdown. It was a catch, then an untouched fumble with the end zone ahead of him. Kenny Hill recovered for a touchback. The game was still scoreless.

There is the opening for the what-if argument. Here is mine: San Francisco was still not winning at the Meadowlands against that team. I know a different play changes what follows. I also know how much I believed in those Giants. Forty-nine to three did nothing to change my mind.

San Francisco came to Giants Stadium for the playoffs and lost 49–3. Burt hit Joe Montana, Taylor took the interception back for a touchdown, and the Giants kept pouring it on.

Rice’s fumble, the defense, and the argument I still stand behind.

Then Washington lost 17–0 in the NFC Championship Game. We beat them for the third time that season. No touchdown. No field goal. Nothing.

There is a particular pleasure in watching your defense make an excellent opponent run out of answers. Giants fans know it in their bones. Those two games gave us a lot of it.

Now the Giants were going to the Super Bowl. After all the waiting, all the old stories, all the explanations for why next year might finally be different, we had a team that could finish this.

Denver made us earn the afternoon.

John Elway and the Broncos were a real problem in the first half at the Rose Bowl. Denver led 10–7 and reached first-and-goal at the one. This is where the defense in our stories had to become the defense on the field.

Taylor stopped Elway. Carson stopped Gerald Willhite. Banks drove Sammy Winder backward. Denver then missed a short field goal. Four opportunities from a possession that had reached the one, and no points.

Later, George Martin sacked Elway for a safety. At halftime, the Giants trailed 10–9. We had work to do. We also had every reason to believe the men doing it.

On the opening drive of the second half, the Giants faced fourth-and-one near midfield and showed a punt look. Jeff Rutledge shifted under center and got the first down. A backup quarterback helping keep the biggest possession of the season alive. Put him in the story, too.

Simms finished that drive with a touchdown pass to Bavaro. The Giants had the lead, 16–10. They never gave it back.

Phil Simms. Twenty-two of twenty-five.

Simms completed every pass he attempted after halftime. Ten throws, ten completions. For the game: 22 of 25, 268 yards, three touchdowns, no interceptions.

On that stage, with that much waiting behind him, he played like that.

The flea-flicker to Phil McConkey went for 44 yards and set up a Morris touchdown. McConkey later caught a touchdown after the ball bounced off Bavaro. The Giants scored the first twenty-four points of the second half. Denver couldn’t keep up.

The final was 39–20. Simms was the MVP. The Giants had their first Super Bowl championship and their first NFL title since 1956.

Three playoff games, a combined score of 105–23. If you wanted to know whether this team was good enough, there was your answer.

Something of our own.

My grandfather, John Tyleski, had the old Giants teams to talk about. Now I had this one.

The pride in those players is still there. I can say LT or Carson or Simms or Bavaro and find my way back to what it felt like when our team became the best team. The years of defending them didn’t disappear. They made the championship mean more.

That is why 1986 stays so close. It arrived at the point in my life when the Giants were becoming part of the person I would carry into adulthood. I had watched them struggle. I had watched them improve. I got to watch them win the whole fucking thing.

Nobody on that bus could take it away. It was pure joy.

There was just one person I wish I could have shared it with. My grandfather hadn’t lived to see it.

He had been happy when the Giants drafted Simms. He thought Phil was going to be great. One of my last football memories of him is how heartbroken he was when Phil got hurt. I can’t put an exact date on that injury now. I remember how much he believed in our quarterback.

This was the man who had sent me off to study Bert Jones and Johnny Unitas after a quarterback conversation that started with the fumble. I listened to him. He had played the game, and I loved learning what he knew.

We had the Yankees. I remember watching Chris Chambliss hit the home run that won the pennant in 1976. Then watching them lose the World Series to the Reds. Then coming back and winning it all in ’77 and ’78.

I got to share that with him. I got to watch the Yankees get back to winning.

Now the Giants had done it, too. The team he had told me about, the team we had watched together, was finally the best in football again.

It would have been nice to see the Giants win again with him. Phil was great. My grandfather knew he could be. I wish we could have watched him be that great together.