Toronto–My tiny midtown apartment currently resembles nothing more than a Boston sports fan’s post-Super-Bowl abode: in short, it looks like a bomb went off in here. In my case, the damage is self-administered: I’m six days away from a trans-Atlantic move, and I’ve reached the point where everything I own is out in the open, waiting to be packed away in a Markham storage unit or a Paris-bound suitcase. It’s chaos.

In Donnie-from-Southie’s case, the blast and wreckage were set off by one man, Eli Fracking Manning, who blew up the New England Patriots’ run at an undefeated, 19-0 NFL season for the ages with one miraculous scramble-and-completion with 1:15 remaining in Super Bowl 42, and the Giants needing a touchdown to win, which they got two plays later via Plaxico Burress. A much needed kick in the teeth to Boston sports fans, if you ask me.

It seems ironic that the completion to the New York Giants’s fourth receiver, David Tyree, came mere days after I dissed him in my Super Bowl predictions: “You can bet on who will score the first touchdown of the game — Randy Moss, a likely suspect, is a 9-to-2 favourite (bet 2 to win 9), while seldom-used Giants receiver David Tyree is a higher-return long shot at 40-to-1.�

Of course, seldom-used Tyree came up with two huge catches in the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl: the first touchdown pass from Eli to make the score 10-7, and the miraculous pin-the-ball-on-the-helmet catch on the winning drive that will go down, along with the game itself, as one of the most memorable in Super Bowl history. Five days after the fact, folks across the continent are still bashing heads, trying to figure out what moniker to tag to this classic play – “The Play� and “The Catch� are front runners, but we already have a classic play called “The Catch,� courtesy of Mr. Joe Montana and Mr. Dwight Clark. I think another candidate, “The Giant Snatch,� has to be considered a dark horse in the race to the bottom.

A quick look back on the proposition bets I made last week reveals that I had a pretty good day, investing 100 TrotterBucks in silly Super Bowl wagers and coming out the other side with a bankroll of 131.46 TrotterBucks. Tiger Woods was big for me, making nine (!) birdies in his final round in Dubai to handily outpace Randy Moss’s receptions total in my largest bet of the day.

I also predicted a fourth-quarter Tom Brady touchdown pass (though I had no idea it would be in a losing effort), a lack of any field goals over 43.5 yards (though my reasoning was spot-on, I’m still pretty surprised that Belichick passed on a long second-half field goal attempt to instead try Brady’s magical arm on a 4th-and-13), and a Giants win by less than 6 points. My reasoning was similarly flawed on the coin flip, with Giants punter Jeff Feagles calling tails instead of heads, though he did continue the NFC’s streak of 11 consecutive coin flip wins. Hey, I bet on tails, and I was right no matter how it happened!

Of course, I didn’t get everything right, but I won’t bore you with the details of my missteps, since they’re forever recorded for posterity on this website until I can figure out how to retroactively change archived columns. I think it has something to do with HTML, but I can’t say for sure.

Also, I should clarify that none of the bets I advocated were actually placed with legal tender through the Las Vegas Hilton, which is probably why I did so well. “You always win with fake money and lose with real money,� remarked the official Sportstrotter fiancée after I’d tallied my winnings. “So you should make fake bets that don’t mean anything, and I should secretly bet real money on those same bets, and then we’ll be rich.� And with schemes like that, you can see exactly why I’m following this woman to France!

So with that, I now sign off on the Toronto-based segment of this column. Of course I’ll miss the Blue Jays, my daily doses of Leafs-induced Schadenfreude, and living in a city where people actually run long distances for pleasure. No Sportstrotter next Friday, as I’ll be doing my damndest to battle through jet lag in the City of Lights, but I’ll be back in this space the following Friday with tales of cycling, rugby, tennis, what the rest of the world calls “football,� and coverage of everything else the European sporting scene has to offer.

And remember, kids: winners never cheat, and cheaters never win. 18-1*: couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch of guys.

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Posted on Friday, February 8th, 2008 at 4:11 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.