“I still get a lot of mail from people who did that,” said John Mara, the chief executive of the Giants. “They start by saying, ‘I didn’t have tickets in the ’60s, so myself and my father and brothers drove up to New Haven to a motel room to watch the games.’ ”

Some fans wrote to his father, Wellington Mara, using their tales of venturing afar to watch games to leapfrog others on the season-ticket waiting list.

“Invariably, they ended up with tickets,” John Mara said. “They knew which chord to hit.”

The heyday of road tripping to watch home games coincided with Allie Sherman’s early seasons as the Giants’ coach. Sherman, who died this month, succeeded Jim Lee Howell in 1961. The Giants were quite good in those days — with stars like Y. A. Tittle, Rosey Grier, Sam Huff, Frank Gifford and Erich Barnes — but in each of Sherman’s first three seasons, his team was defeated in the N.F.L. championship game.

The success of the Giants, who also lost the 1958 and ’59 title games to the Baltimore Colts, fueled the desire of some fans to watch their home games. But the league’s blackout policy was firm: Home games could not be broadcast within the 75-mile radius that constituted the Giants’ New York market. The policy was amended in the 1970s to impose a blackout only if the games were not sold out within 72 hours of kickoff. Although blackouts were fairly common through the 1990s, they have gradually tailed off. Last season, the league said, there were only two. This season, there were none.