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And apparently he never complained about it. I guess he accepted the fact that that was his role, and he went out and practiced hard every day and was a good team guy, and whatever they asked him to do, he did. And kinda just waited his turn. And when they needed him and they gave him the ball, he played great, to the point where he’s the MVP of the Super Bowl. The way Parcells—who can be sort of flippant in talking about even his own players—there was just a different tone in his talking about Ottis Anderson. I picked up on it. You just got the feeling he genuinely liked this guy and respected what he had been to that team. And what a pro he was.

Eventually, reporters working on deadline had their fill of quotes and let the players and coaches continue their celebration. Buses bound for the team hotel carried Giants players and their families—except Johnie Cooks’ mother, who boarded the wrong bus and was eventually driven there by a Good Samaritan—back for more celebration.

“The third floor kept rocking until 6:30 a.m.,” Mark Ingram said.

Separately, Parcells threw a party for his assistants, trainers, the equipment managers, and their families.

While Giants players drank champagne and their shouts filled the Hyatt Westshore Regency, their field general was nowhere to be found. The battered quarterback preferred the company of his family . . . and a soft bed. In his hotel room with his wife and children, brothers Doug, Ron, Todd, sister Cheryl and brother-in-law Steve, his father Norm, and his mother Dolly—who would pass away unexpectedly six weeks later—Jeff Hostetler sat very still, bags of ice affixed to his entire body.

“My elbow is killing me and I still have a headache,” he said. “I’m probably as sore as I’ve been in some time. But it’s a good sore.”

The following morning at 9:30, Hostetler gently rolled out of bed and took the elevator down to the lobby. There, he and most of his teammates—the seven Pro Bowlers boarded a plane for Honolulu hours earlier—waited for their ride to the airport. A few sportswriters waited with them.

“A couple of us were standing around at the desk,” said Ernie Palladino, the Giants beat writer for the Gannett Suburban Newspapers. “We were talking to Mark Collins, the safety, and we were asking him about a particular play in the game. He stopped in mid sentence and he said, ‘Damn, wasn’t that a great game?’”

At around five o’clock that evening, the team plane landed at Newark International Airport. Three buses then drove the team to Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, where players and coaches could clear out their lockers.

And that’s when the Giants’ Super Bowl honeymoon ended.

Over the previous ten days, the Giants had won two of the most physical, grueling, closely contested playoff games in NFL history. And they had flown just under twelve thousand miles to do so. The tired players just wanted to finish their final task of the 1990 season and head home. Therefore, the buses zipped through the parking lot, headed into the stadium, and unloaded the players inside the stadium.

The nine hundred fans that waited for hours in parking lots number nine and eleven expected a little more pomp and circumstance upon their arrival.

“You’d think it would be a little more personal than this,” Newark’s Roger Sanders—who had brought with him his two sons—told a reporter. “I took the day off from work for this. And what do you get? Buses. I wanted to see Bill Parcells and Jeff Hostetler give speeches.”

“What they did is rude,” said New Jersey resident Lisa Teichman. “It’s like we didn’t exist. They could have at least said something.”

Those few disgruntled fans could at least look forward to the standard public celebration: a parade or rally to honor the team. But New York City Mayor David N. Dinkins—who had promised to “do something” should the Giants win—decided that there was no room in the budget for a ticker-tape parade. (Similarly, no ticker-tape parade was thrown when the Giants won Super Bowl XXI. Because the team played its home games in New Jersey,