State of Mind

 

Now that our two local football teams have transitioned into the past tense, with equally disappointing seasons, it’s time to finally come to terms with reality. The New York Giants are a fiction. The New York Jets are a figment of our collective imagination. Because neither team exists. To properly honor The Sopranos, 25 years after its debut, would be, in part, to begin this difficult conversation. 

It's time both teams residing in East Rutherford, New Jersey accepted that they are both key parts of the Garden State’s fabric. Material that includes a diverse array of flotsam and jetsam found clogging The Meadowlands. A place which, on the aforementioned HBO show was where characters could reflect on their life choices or use the overgrown flora to obscure serious crimes. 

The truth is that neither the boys in blue nor the gangrenous franchise have any authentic connection to New York. Not anymore. All that evaporated with the passage of time. Like so many New Yorkers before them, they left the urban maze for a quieter existence in the ‘burbs. They are Jersey teams with Jersey values. So you have to accept who you are and who are not.

As a kid, growing up in New Jersey, a mere twelve miles from Manhattan, I understood it was a cardinal sin to ever say I was, “from New York.” It didn’t matter I was born there and even now, all these years later living in the outer boroughs, I still offer the essential qualification that I was “raised in Jersey.”  It doesn’t matter that people who claim to live in LA typically live in the outer reaches of Los Angeles County, far from Grauman’s, Wilshire Boulevard or the Hollywood sign. That’s their problem. Out here, where the weather still changes, we should be better than that. 

New Jersey is about being stuck in traffic on the helix, questioning the lane width on the GSP, and omitting prepositions when speaking of trips “down the shore.” It’s a state of little pretension and lots of traffic. It’s home to great universities, revolutionary battlefields, and yes, that stupid show from MTV. It gave the world Bruce and Frank and countless others.

These two teams are running from who they are. Maybe the Giants have proved they can be two things at once. But the Jets clearly cannot. Mark my words: they will not win a Super Bowl until they accept their identity. Only then will the wrongs of the past be righted.

 

The New Jersey Jets has a nice ring to it, right? Not a high bar since 1969, the New York Jets has no ring to it.