The Giants are the team that twice walked into January as nobody’s pick and walked out having broken hearts that were not even mine to break. They are also, I should say up front, the team whose name is on my city’s deepest Super Bowl wound. But these pages are about the playoffs, and in the playoffs the Giants have a particular and admirable habit. They get hot at the worst possible time for everyone else.

Two improbable January runs

After the 2007 season they went on the road as a wild card, won in the frozen tundra of Green Bay in overtime in one of the coldest games ever, and then ended a perfect Patriots season in the Super Bowl. After the 2011 season they did it again, knocking off Green Bay and San Francisco before another title. Two runs, both as underdogs, both ending with the favorite stunned.

The quieter recent years

It has been thinner since. The Giants snuck back into January after the 2022 season and won a wild-card game before bowing out, but the deep runs that defined the late-2000s teams have not returned. The franchise that specialized in January ambushes has gone a while between them.

Two of the great underdog runs the playoffs have produced, both authored when no one believed. Giants fans, your team’s gift is peaking in the cold, and twice it cost the favorites everything. From a fan whose franchise never could find that January gear, I respect the teams that did, even the ones I would rather forget.