One of the few aphorisms I have committed to memory is a Nick Hornby line from “Fever Pitch”: “The natural state of the football fan is bitter disappointment, no matter what the score.” Hornby is talking about soccer, not American football, but the idea translates well. I am a lifelong football miserabilist, and more specifically a New York Giants miserabilist.

Now, you might find it preposterous that anyone could be made miserable by a team that has won two of the last five Super Bowls. But the roots of my Giants miserabilism run deep. My father, otherwise an uncommonly cheerful man, approached Giants fandom as a Viennese-style exercise in high neurosis. I inherited this perverse trait from him. Whether it was in the stadium or at home, he and I watched every game in a sustained state of anxiety, forever envisioning worst-case scenarios.

It helped that the Giants were adept at realizing such scenarios, being a losing team for all but two years of the ’70s. The lowlight of my childhood came against the Philadelphia Eagles in 1978, when the Giants’ quarterback, Joe Pisarcik — who needed only to take a knee to preserve a victory — was ordered to hand off the ball to the running back Larry Csonka. It’s well documented that the handoff was botched and that the Eagles’ Herman Edwards scooped up the fumble and ran it in for the game-winning touchdown. Less well known is that my father, watching this scene unfold on TV, dove over the coffee table and onto our living-room carpet in a futile attempt to recover the ball.

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Our miserabilism was clearly a hedge against heartbreak, but even when the Giants started winning in the Bill Parcells years, it didn’t abate. The Super Bowl victories of ’87 and ’91? We greeted them more with relief than with exultation.

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In 2007, my father told me that he no longer felt up to attending games at the stadium; at 76, he had become too hobbled to endure the stairs and the crowds. The first Sunday of that season was like one of those time-jump edits in movies — as if a P.O.V. camera, fixed on a 2006 view of my dad to my right, swung forward to regard the field and then swung back to my right to reveal . . . my new companion, my 8-year-old son. I felt a needly sensation in my sinuses — the beginnings of tears. But I held them in. I was a miserabilist, not a sentimentalist.