" It was supposed to be a quarterbacking coronation and so it was, but it was the wrong quarterback who won the crown.

All week long Eli Manning kept hearing that if Tom Brady could win Super Bowl XLVI he would be, as NFL Network's Warren Sapp put it yesterday morning, "the greatest quarterback to ever play."

He didn't and so he isn't, failing to hit the final Hail Myra pass of the season as time ran out on the Patriots [team stats] in a 21-17 loss to their Super Bowl nemesis, the New York Giants.

All the difficult things they had overcome this season finally ground them down, a porous defense buckling in the face of a last-minute Manning assault that turned a 17-15 fourth-quarter Patriots lead into defeat with 57 seconds to play. Unlike those Super Bowls of yore, when it was always Brady's arm that carried the day, this time it was Eli Manning who delivered a perfect 38-yard pass to Mario Manningham to get his team out of the shadow of its own goal line with 3:46 to play, setting off what would become a 88-yard game-winning drive in just two minutes and 49 seconds."