Thank the heavens that there are two more weeks left in February.
Bet you never thought you would hear someone saying that, did you? Welcome to February 2012, the first half of which has been about as good as the shortest and cruelest month of the year could ever hope to be.
The fact that it has been unseasonably warm in what is usually a spirit-crushing end of winter would be reason enough to smile a little bigger, but that's just the start of the fun. In the last 12 days, we've seen the Giants win the Super Bowl, the birth of Linsanity and five Rangers wins that have put the Eastern Conference deep into the rearview mirror.
Beyond that, the three most impressive individual players in football, basketball and hockey have all been playing for our teams. Eli Manning, Jeremy Lin and Henrik Lundqvist don't have all that much in common -- it would be the start of a pretty good joke if you had them walking into a bar, actually -- outside of the fact that they are, without much question, doing the most exciting things of anyone in their respective sports right now.
We'll probably need a Canadian overthrow of the magazine business to get Lundqvist to join Manning and Lin for three straight local Sports Illustrated covers, but we'll make do without that prize. Probably best not to push our luck curse-wise anyway.
You could rack your brain for another fortnight without ever coming up with another stretch that matches this one for New York sports glory. The Rangers have the only loss in the stretch and that one came with the help of a controversial decision to wave off a goal late in a 1-0 loss to the Devils.
This is not a city that has a hard time feeling like we are the center of the universe, but there's no denying that we're the hottest thing going in the only three professional sports that have played games this month.
The Yankees should petition Major League Baseball to let them start the season before the month is out.
U.S. & World
Come to think of it, the Mets should probably join the petition. If anything is going to turn that franchise around it is going to be whatever has been dumped into our water supply this month.
When thinking about incredible sports months in New York history, it is impossible not to let the mind drift back to June 1994. That's when the Knicks and Rangers were both making playoff runs and every night had us perched on the edges of seats to see if they could keep it up long enough to give us two parades.
We had to settle for just one that year, although that didn't do all that much to diminish how much fun it was to experience this city collectively turn itself over to sports. It's happening again and, if we're permitted to put on the rose-colored glasses of biased optimism, we're awfully curious to see what this June might have in store for us.
That's getting too far ahead, obviously. We've still got two more weeks of February to savor.
Josh Alper is a writer living in New York City. You can follow him on Twitter and he is also a contributor to Pro Football Talk.
