When Patriots fan Fay Thurston pulled up the shade on a front window of her Southington home on Feb. 4, 2008, she was greeted by a reminder of the Super Bowl disappointment from the day before.
The score — 17-14 — was sprayed in blue paint on the snow on her front lawn.
It was the day after the Giants upset the previously unbeaten Patriots. Thurston was the victim of some gloating from her neighbor, Bob Taylor.
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Southington, CT, USA
Taylor, of course, loves the Giants.
“I couldn’t believe it!” Thurston said. “But I did have a good laugh.”
Thurston, who turns 80 in April, grew up in Wareham, Mass., and retains a deep love for Boston sports, despite living in Southington since 1956.
Taylor, 60, grew up in Southington as a huge fan of the New York Football Giants.
They live a few doors away from each other at the end of a cul de sac and have formed a quintessential Connecticut sports friendship. Thurston watches football games with Taylor and his friends, quietly cheering for the Patriots while the four men root for the Giants.
When the Giants and Patriots meet on Super Bowl Sunday, Thurston expects to be watching the game on the 46-inch TV inside Taylor’s heated garage with her four Giants-loving friends. She’ll sip ginger ale while they drink beer, outnumbered but no less passionate for the team she has followed since its inception.
Similar scenes will play out all over Connecticut, the most divided swath of fandom in the country. Over the past decade, we’ve seen the rivalry between the Red Sox and Yankees reach a boiling point in a state where fans of both teams are forced to co-exist.
And four years ago, the Giants and Patriots engaged in their own version of the New York-Boston duel. The Giants ended the Patriots’ bid for an unbeaten season in one of the great upsets in NFL history, but we learned that the football rivalry was hardly as heated as the baseball version.
The Giants had a 35-year jump on the Patriots and cultivated a deep following throughout New England for decades before the Patriots appeared as an American Football League franchise in 1960. The Patriots joined the NFL in 1970, but the Giants retained fans in New England and even in Greater Boston.
That domination has lessened in recent years, as the Patriots became a championship-caliber team.
“I switched my allegiance to the Patriots in the 1960s and suffered through the 2008 Super Bowl defeat,” Manchester resident Floyd Champagne said in an email. “I not only want the Patriots to win, I would like them to win in a spectacular fashion that leaves Giants’ fans stunned.”
Champagne grew up in Massachusetts as a Giants’ fan, remembering when he sat in stunned silence as his beloved team lost to the Colts in the 1958 NFL Championship game.
These days, he is surrounded by Giants fans. But Connecticut’s rooting interest also has some personal connections, from Bill Belichick’s Wesleyan ties to Aaron Hernandez’s following in his hometown of Bristol.
Downstate Connecticut is traditionally firm Giants territory; the team once trained in Fairfield and played games in the Yale Bowl. North Haven native Kevin Gilbride in New York’s offensive coordinator, while Giants’ linebacker Mark Herzlich has his own state ties — his parents met while students at Wesleyan and both are from the state, Sandy from West Hartford and Barb from Norwalk.
The Patriots includes three players from the state: offensive lineman Donald Thomas (West Haven and UConn), linebacker Niko Koutouvides (Plainville) and Hernandez. Koutouvides’ parents own the Stonewell Restaurant in Farmington, which will host a Super Bowl party for fans of both teams, although Stelios Koutouvides recently told The Courant there will be a “special aura because we have two Patriots players from our area.”
In Bristol, students and staff at the South Side School held a sendoff pep rally for Hernandez’s mother, Terri. She is a secretary at the school that Aaron attended and the entire school population wore Patriots T-shirts at the rally.
No matter that many of the students and staff were Giants fans.
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