There’s no place like New York when it comes to a shared experience among citizens. My favorite thing to share with people here is revelry. Giving me money and Raisinettes is a close second.

The Giants just won the Super Bowl and people are out in the streets. There is hooting and hollering and it seems genuinely gleeful and celebratory. Buses and garbage trucks are honking their impossibly-loud horns, and as I approach Times Square, I am becoming enveloped in a cacophony of noise and cheers and sirens that seems only partly infused by an affinity for alcohol and a distaste for Boston.

People are happy. Not end-of-Ghostbusters II happy, but really happy and you know it clap your hands happy. And here’s a place where you CAN clap your hands and you CAN stomp your feet and honk your horns and scream and shout.

And I can’t help but think how much this city deserves it. Sure, it has New Year’s every year. But since 9/11, there’s been no citywide accomplishment to celebrate… Certainly nothing of this national magnitude with international attention and with such an unexpected and satisfying outcome.

Yes it was millionaires we’ll never meet playing a game many don’t fully understand, but they played it against a “perfect” team in a gritty, hard-nosed, never-quit way, right up until literally the last second.

A firetruck just drove by on 42nd street. Its lights were flashing. Its horn was honking. But there was no emergency. The mean in their reflective jackets were waving their arms in victory.

This wasn’t just a football game. This wasn’t just a win.

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