The sport of politics. The politics of sport.

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The clock was stopped with about 8:12 to go in the fourth quarter of Super Bowl XLII. The New England Patriots were trailing the New York Giants 7-10. Being a diligent Pats fan with only the team’s best interests in mind, I kept my eye on the clock.

But something wasn’t right. Were Fox’s graphics frozen? As play resumed on the field, the clock didn’t move. without the clock moving. We hadn’t been hallucinating.

“The clock’s not moving,” I said to my boyfriend, a fellow Pats devotee.

“Hmm,” he said. He saw what I was talking about but didn’t know what to say.

We figured it was a glitch in Fox’s graphics and that the REAL time clock was probably reading the correct time of approximately 8:43. Another play or play-and-a-half were executed on the field, as the clock remained on 8:12.

“Do you think anyone knows?” I asked.

What could we do? For such an important game, surely SOME responsible individual(s) had made sure to fix the problem. We could only hope.

But today, thanks to ESPN’s Mike Tirico, we learned there was nothing wrong with Fox’s graphics. The game clock, according to Tirico, did, in fact, stop for about 30 seconds and nobody — not the officials, not NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, not eagle-eye Pats coach Bill Belichick, not Giants coach Tom Coughlin, none of their players – nobody caught the fact that 30 seconds had been added to the fourth quarter of a game that ultimately went down to the wire and in which clock management would be critical to the outcome.

We’ll never know whether the non-ticking time clock was a ticking time bomb that doomed the Patriots by allowing Eli Manning and the Giants to benefit from an extra 30 seconds’ worth of pressure-free play on their winning drive. We don’t know if those extra 30 seconds helped the Giants win — after all, they had pretty well shut down the Patriots offense for most of the game and nobody can take that away from them.

We also don’t know if the Patriots should just as well be happy they had 35 seconds to TRY to stage a comeback. It wasn’t much to work with, but it was something. But then they might not have had to worry about that if the Giants had made a mistake while rushing to score with 30 seconds less time to work with than the faulty clock said they had.

All we know is that 30 seconds is an eternity when the game is on the line and the two-minute warning has been sounded. What we know is that this officiating error SHOULD have been caught by more than just a few millions fans with no ability to communicate the error to officials. The faulty play clock may have helped the Giants win. This is not the typical “lucky” break of a ball bouncing one way, or tipped into the hands of an opposing team. This was a major technical error in officiating that can easily be seen as having compromised the integrity of the game.

Here’s my question, which few in the sports media seem willing to address — maybe because it’s too easy for others to view it as Tuesday-morning quarterbacking or Patriots-fan sour grapes: What if those extra 30 seconds had helped the Patriots instead of the Giants? Wouldn’t many people be insisting that an * be placed next to the Pats victory?

It would be very easy to apply that negative standard to the Giants win if SOME people REALLY wanted to. Many have certainly been prepared to put an * on the Patriots, from Spygate to the fact that they lost their final game after a spectacular 2007-08 season none of us had any right to expect.

The Patriots are unlikely to challenge this error, but I hope the League doesn’t let it slide. Whoever was supposed to be keeping an eye on the clock took their eye off the ball — in so doing, they just MIGHT have rewritten destiny.

(*We watched a replay of the game on NFL Network Feb. 6, and while the tape was edited to not show the entire time stoppage, at 8:24 the Giants took the ball and played out one down without the clock moving. We hadn’t been hallucinating.)

Yours Truly, A.F. Cook