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. . . You come to the realization that no man is invincible.”

Super Bowl XXV shaped up as a battle of the old guard versus the new guard. No player on Buffalo’s roster ever suited up for a Super Bowl before; twenty-two Giants had. The Bills were younger, louder, and with their frenetic, high-scoring offense, more exciting: a new team for a new decade. Compared to their opponent, the Giants were relics. Like Taylor, the Giants starter at right cornerback, Everson Walls, was finishing his tenth season. The league’s oldest kicker accounted for all New York’s scoring in their NFC Championship Game victory. And the NFL’s oldest running back spearheaded the team’s snail’s-paced offensive attack. The Giants appeared very 1980s, very passé.

“They’re cocky,” New York’s cornerback Mark Collins replied. “They’re supposed to be. I didn’t fly here to lose. But we’re not talking a good game. We want to play it.”

Perhaps the rest of the Giants were too tired to engage the Bills in a war of words: their trip to Tampa wasn’t quite as swift as their opponent’s. After the brutally physical win in San Francisco, the Giants had to travel cross-country to reach the Super Bowl site. With the time change, they didn’t arrive until early Monday morning.

Many aboard were too excited by the victory to sleep, dancing the conga through the aisle to the music on Pepper Johnson’s portable sound system.

“I think for anybody that was on the plane, it’s one of the most memorable times in our sporting lives because it was very euphoric,” Parcells said. “Have a couple beers, relax, enjoy the fruits of victory.”

Even after the team settled, players and coaches chose their words carefully when speaking to reporters. During New York’s Media Day session, no Giant would announce, “I’d rather have played the Raiders.”

Instead, offensive tackle Jumbo Elliott called Bruce Smith the “best player I’ve ever gone against,” a fact that was not overlooked by the head coach.

“Obviously, Bruce Smith was going to be a key,” former New York Post beat-writer Hank Gola recalled. “And Jumbo was kind of a laid-back guy. And Parcells loved to push buttons and motivate individually.

Jumbo was a little tougher nut to crack in that way because he was so laid back, nothing bothered him, he was very even-keeled. But [Parcells] knew that Jumbo faced this tremendous challenge in Bruce Smith. So he instructed [Lawrence Taylor] during practice that week to just harass, get in his face, and irritate him and get him so angry that he would take it out on Bruce Smith in the game.

[Parcells] knew that was a key matchup and he didn’t want to have to give Jumbo a lot of help: double teams, sliding protection, or anything. He knew that if Jumbo could take Bruce Smith one-on-one, then the rest of the game plan had a chance of working.

The overwhelming public praise for Buffalo—both through the press and on the Giants’ practice field—wasn’t only directed toward Bruce Smith.

Talking about the Bills and their back-to-back offensive explosions, Parcells admitted to reporters that the combination of Thomas, Kelly, James Lofton, and Andre Reed would be a major concern for the Giants.

“The Bills have everything going for them,” Carl Banks added. “And that makes us nervous.”

While several Bills repeatedly complained to reporters about having gone unacknowledged, the Giants could make the same claim. But they didn’t, at least not publicly—not even when they checked into their hotel, the Hyatt Regency Westshore.

“We get there and they didn’t even have the ability to change who was staying in our room,” Giants left tackle Doug Riesenberg said years later. “I was [49ers left tackle] ‘Mr. Harris Barton’ for four or five days. They didn’t even have the ability to take off the ‘Congratulations San Francisco’ signs.”

The Hyatt staff and Tampa’s Super Bowl Planning Committee must have read the San Francisco Chronicle article that reported that the 49ers sent staffers to Tampa to rent and install $30,000 worth of office equipment (fax machines, filing cabinets, computers, sixty-eight desks, and 112