The Real New York Giants

Even if you can replace the players who were lost, how do you replace all the other guys who made the team so damn much fun? Tommy Haskell was the tight ends coach and wrote the team newsletter. Mike Cawley set up the after-game beer parties. Danny Suhr, the first fireman to die that day, was the treasurer. Offensive coordinator Mike Stackpole lost his brother, Tim. Linebacker Zach Fletcher lost his twin brother, Andre.

How do you go on when so many guys are dead that you can't even retire their jerseys because you wouldn't have enough left to dress the team? How do you play a game draped in sorrow like that?

Came the first team meeting, and the club didn't get anywhere near its usual 60 guys. It got 120. All the lineup holes were patched. Guys who had retired signed up again. Guys who'd been asked 10 times said yes on the 11th. You cry together at enough funerals, you figure you can bleed together on a football field, too. One thing about firemen, they don't let each other fight battles alone.

Talk about a comeback year. "You've got to understand," says the team's president, Neil Walsh. "We all go to each other's weddings, christenings, graduations. I broke your brother in, and your dad broke me in, and I carried your son out of the pile. We're all brothers."

Not long ago a third-grade teacher found the team's water boy—Walsh's son Ryan—sobbing uncontrollably in the boys' bathroom. "To him, all those guys were his uncles," says Walsh. "He couldn't handle losing them all in one day."

Some holes are easier to patch than others.