Who Was That Super Couple?

When the Giants won the NFC Championship, my husband Frank and I had a moment. 

Our two boys decided to wear only Giants blue until the Super Bowl, not a problem in a household that owns 47 Giants shirts — including one purchased at the 1987 Super Bowl.

Our sons already knew their parents were in Pasadena when the Giants beat the Broncos, 39-20, yet suddenly our long-ago trip meant this set of 50-ish parents did once know how to be spontaneous, carefree, maybe even cool.

“The minute the Giants won the NFC that year, your mother was on the phone to the airlines,” Frank told the boys. “We didn’t even have game tickets.”

The kids’ mouths dropped, accustomed to parents who are Olympian advance-planners.

Back then, the Giants had not won a championship in decades. For a couple who met on a bus to Yale Bowl (where the homeless Giants played in 1976), and whose best dates were spent screaming “Go LT!” this Super Bowl trip was perfect.

We must have had to request vacation days, find an airport ride and arrange pet care. But I only remember a fierce and unfettered determination to not let once-in-a-lifetime pass by. We were 20-something, kidless, mortgage-less, fearless.

“Wow. How did you get tickets?” asked the 14-year-old.

“The day before we left, a guy I knew got some,” Frank said, noting we paid the usurious amount of $450 for the pair (face value, $75 each).

“How did you find a hotel room?”

“Mom’s cousin lived in Hollywood; we figured we’d camp on his floor.”

What?  No stressed-out parents poring over guidebooks and gaming Priceline for a half-price suite?

“And, we got stranded in Chicago. Snowbound,” I recalled. The unscheduled overnight at the O’Hare Hilton just another piece of the adventure: room service, a movie, serendipity.  That’s what I remember — being young and optimistic, besotted with each other and football, with a bare-faced optimism, a why-not, let’s do it, c’mon-get-happy attitude.

Of course we’d find tickets. Of course the snow would stop, cousin Larry would cheerfully put us up, we’d get time off, pay cash, and drive five hours straight back to my parents’ house in Las Vegas, delirious with victory. 

The 9-year-old asked if we texted during half-time, but he liked what I told him did happen instead. When a nearby fan asked where we were from and I said, “Elmwood Park, New Jersey,” a big guy two rows ahead turned around. “What street?” he asked, and then extended his hand. “I’m your mailman.”

Twenty years later, most of the game is a blur, though I followed each play, moaned and prayed, whooped and groaned like the die-hard fan I was  (I do remember thinking John Elway was cute, but never said so aloud).  Frank can recount key plays, replay bad calls, reenact each Giant point.

What I recall, sometimes with chagrin, is the effortless comradeship, the untroubled impromptu zealousness we inhabited then, a coupled simpatico now so elusive, even in a family that watches football together. And I secretly rue having been supplanted as my husband’s number one cheering-screaming partner in Giants fandom.

“Can we have a Super Bowl party?” the boys asked. A checklist popped into my head: clean house, grocery shop, scrub nacho stains from carpet.  But then I remembered the take-out menu clipped to the refrigerator.

“What the heck,” I said, and touched my husband’s blue-shirted shoulder.


Lisa Romeo is a Cedar Grove writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, O, The Oprah Magazine, literary journals and anthologies. More personal essays and humor pieces at www.LisaRomeo.blogspot.com.

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