Our miserabilism was clearly a hedge against heartbreak, but even when the Giants started winning in the Bill Parcells years, it didn’t abate. The Super Bowl victories of ’87 and ’91? We greeted them more with relief than with exultation.

In 2007, my father told me that he no longer felt up to attending games at the stadium; at 76, he had become too hobbled to endure the stairs and the crowds. The first Sunday of that season was like one of those time-jump edits in movies — as if a P.O.V. camera, fixed on a 2006 view of my dad to my right, swung forward to regard the field and then swung back to my right to reveal . . . my new companion, my 8-year-old son. I felt a needly sensation in my sinuses — the beginnings of tears. But I held them in. I was a miserabilist, not a sentimentalist.

The Giants made an improbable run in the playoffs that season, advancing to the Super Bowl with an overtime road victory over the Green Bay Packers, an outcome my father and I discussed with wonderment over the phone. But in the week before Super Bowl XLII, Dad fell gravely ill with pneumonia and was hospitalized. One of the last things he said to me, mustering all his strength simply to lift the oxygen mask from his face, was, “The Giants are gonna win!” — a curiously unmiserabilist sentiment.