ONE HAIL OF
Nicks’ epic 37-yard TD to end 1st half is
Hakeem Nicks can still see the football coming to him right now, dropping out of the sky into the left corner of the end zone at Lambeau Field. He can still tell you how Hail Marys aren’t supposed to go like this, because they’re supposed to be total gambles, with little chance of success. But this 37yard grab from Eli Manning felt different, a rainbow that seemed headed right toward Nicks, with no defender in his way, so perfect that even though he mistimed when he grabbed for it, it smacked him in the helmet and turned into a catch anyway.
“The ball, it actually came right to me,” Nicks says now. “I didn’t have no choice but to catch it.”
So Nicks clutched the ball tightly as he fell to the ground, giving the Giants a 10-point halftime lead against the favored Green Bay Packers on that Sunday five years ago. It was a stunning score that sapped the life from the crowd at a raucous Lambeau, the “dagger” TD, as Nicks puts it, in an eventual 37-20 NFC divisional playoff upset that sent Big Blue hurtling toward Super Bowl XLVI.
It was the biggest play of the Giants’ last postseason visit to Lambeau, even though it’s the play most often forgotten from Big Blue’s shocking Super Bowl run five Januarys ago. History remembers Victor Cruz’s 99-yard jaunt against the Jets, and Mario Manningham’s sideline Super Bowl masterpiece against New England.
But as the Giants head back to Lambeau Field to face the Packers in the NFC wild-card round on Sunday, making their first playoff appearance in five years, no play presents more parallels for what Big Blue hopes to accomplish this postseason — and how it plans to accomplish that.
“That play goes unnoticed and untalked about in how huge it was,” says Cruz. “It really propelled us for the rest of that game, and we just took that momentum to the rest of the games, too.”
Five years ago in Green Bay, on a night when the Giants ‘D’ was at its best and the offense couldn’t run the ball, a bighanded, highly motivated playmaker made a dynamic catch to rip the heart from the Packers. And it’s that same formula that this Giants team, the Sunday underdog despite an 11-5 record, hopes to ride this postseason, with the league’s second-best scoring defense holding teams down until Odell Beckham Jr. can make game-changing plays.
“It feels great to have that capability,” says Cruz. “Obviously, we want to be able to score points methodically with drives, but if it comes down to a guy making a big play at any given moment, we’ll take that, too.”
lll That’s exactly what the Giants needed on that Jan. 12, 2012, against a Packers team that seemed even more dangerous than the red-hot 2016 edition. As good as Rodgers has been this season, he was better back then, throwing a career-high 45 TDs to win his first MVP. The Pack was 15-1, a Packers-Patriots Super Bowl on everyone’s mind.
The Giants were supposed to be an NFC divisional round patsy, 9-7 during the regular season, with a rushing attack ranked dead last in football. They’d already lost to the Packers during the regular season, too, thanks to a 4-TD symphony from Rodgers.
Yet 29 minutes in, the Giants were leading the Pack, 13-10, thanks to Nicks, who had also caught a 66-yard TD from Manning in the first quarter. He’d been hungry to make his mark in the postseason after missing the playoffs during his first two years in the NFL (which sounds a lot like Beckham’s career arc).
“I was locked in, I was serious,” Nicks says. “I had wanted to be in that situation so bad; it took me three years to get there. By the time I got there, I said I want to do some stuff to make history.”
Nicks would write himself into the NFL history books, too, finishing that playoffs with 444 receiving yards, the second-highest total in a single postseason. And the Hail Mary connection with Manning at Lambeau was his biggest catch of that run.
“I would say it’s Top 3, Top 5 in my career,” says Nicks, who is currently a free agent. “It’s one that definitely stands out, because of the situation and the moment and the game.”
And the moment had been desperate. The Giants had owned the first quarter, taking a 10-3 lead, but Green Bay had come to life in the second, behind (what else?) a Rodgers TD pass, a blocked field goal and an interception of Manning. And the Giants, much