Bavaro kept going.

You know the Bavaro play. Of course you do.

Mark Bavaro catches the ball and keeps moving with defenders hanging on him. Ronnie Lott is in there. That is Ronnie fucking Lott trying to tackle him.

Bavaro keeps going anyway.

I love that image. I love the game around it just as much, because that catch belongs to a comeback that told us a lot about the 1986 Giants.

Seventeen to nothing at the half.

San Francisco had a 17–0 lead at Candlestick. That is a long way back against that team in that stadium.

Then the Giants scored twenty-one points in the third quarter. All the points they would need. The defense kept San Francisco from adding anything after halftime, and New York won 21–17.

Bavaro’s catch and run covered thirty-one yards. The distance tells you what the play gained. The men hanging onto him tell you what he had to do to earn it.

That is the part I keep coming back to. There were good reasons for the play to end. Bavaro kept making the defenders try again.

Phil could bring us back.

I think of this game with fourth-and-seventeen in Minnesota. Two different problems, and an offense with Phil Simms at the center finding a way through both.

Our defense gave us every reason to believe. Now I could watch the offense fall behind and still believe it had an answer. We were learning all the ways this team could win.

When San Francisco came to the Meadowlands for the playoffs, that belief was already there. By January, I believed we had a championship team.

We had been watching them become one.