A mixture of pride and joy - and, let's face it, a day off work and school - sent New York Giants fans flocking to lower Manhattan on Tuesday for a ticker-tape parade to honor the Super Bowl heroes.
Nick Mascarelli, 12, a seventh-grader from Staten Island, arrived early for the midday parade with his mother, twin brother and friends. "It's great not going to school," conceded Nick, his face painted half red and half blue.
The parade will begin at the tip of lower Manhattan in Battery Park and proceed north on Broadway, going past the financial district and the site of the World Trade Center before finishing at City Hall Park. The stretch is known as the "Canyon of Heroes."
As the team assembled at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., for the bus ride into Manhattan, many players carried video cameras to record personal images of the parade, which was expected to draw upwards of 1 million fans.
"I still can't believe it," defensive end Michael Strahan said. "I'm still in some kind of shock."
The Giants last won the Super Bowl in 1991, and the last New York team to win a championship in any of the four major sports was the New York Yankees in 2000.
The Giants will be showered with some 50 tons of confetti, and Bloomberg will give team officials the key to the city after the parade.
All the while, New Yorkers will be casting their ballots for president. New York and the 23 other Super Tuesday states are holding primaries that could collectively seal the fates of the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates.
Just south of City Hall, politics and the parade crossed paths as signs for Democratic candidate Barack Obama were surrounded by fans wearing Giants red, white and blue.
The city had tons of shredded paper on hand for the parade, but some fans came prepared with toilet paper. An hour before the parade, several street lamps along Broadway were covered in streams of white tissue.
Justice Rodriguez, 11, of Brooklyn, was up at 3 a.m. with his father and half-dozen friends to secure a spot along Broadway complete with chairs, food and a camcorder.
"I want to see Eli Manning," said the boy, who wore a Manning No. 10 shirt over a puffy down jacket.
"It's exciting for him," said Justice's father, Juan Rodriguez, who took the day off from his car wash job. "You never know when they'll win again."