Opinion : A \'changed forever\' NYC now is home to Tim Tebow

“Are you ready for some Tim Tebow? You better be, because he’s coming to your town and he wants to party down.”

Those are some of the lamest words written about the quarterback in a weekend full of lame words.

The person who began his story on that particular CBS web site is identified as a “senior blogger,” which of course makes one wonder how bad a junior blogger’s writing is.

But the fun thing about the Tebow thing is where it’s happening.

‘Changed Forever’ … or not?

“9/11 changed NY sports forever,” reads a headline over a story written on the 10th anniversary of that event by Mike Lopresti of the Gannett News Service.

And of course, that awful day has impacted NYC and its athletes and coaches in ways we could never understand without experiencing it.

New York Giants owner John Mara sat in his office that Tuesday morning, with a friend who spent most of his days working at the WorldTradeCenter. That man was on his way to a meeting when the first plane hit, so he went to the stadium where the Jets and Giants play. The flames and smoke from the towers 14 miles away were clearly visible from the top of the stadium. Mara’s friend watched the towers collapse, knowing that most of his colleagues had just died in front of his eyes.

Current Giants Coach Tom Coughlin had a son working in the second of the TwinTowersto be hit by a jet that day. Tim Coughlin and others decided to evacuate, but a security guard met them on the 44th floor and told them to go back to their offices. Tim called his father, who told him to get out immediately. Five minutes later, the second jet hit Tim’s tower.

That kind of stuff changes a person, and a city, forever.

However: Before 9/11 the NY Giants and the NY Jets would get into fights during their regular season games. After 9/11, they got into a fight in pre-season games.

Before 9/11, the Giants and Jets would trash each other. In the post-9/11 world, they trashed their own teammates.

I have also noted in previous stories about 9/11 that murders actually went up in NYC in 2002, and for several years afterwards.

While I generally try not to criticize the way any person or group handles grief and tragedy, it would seem to me that increasing the number of New Yorkers killed by New Yorkers would not be the best way to handle one’s feelings.

NYC, to an outsider, appears in many ways to be way more crazy than before the event that we thought would lead to a more mellow, thoughtful, united city.

And into the craziness comes: Tim Tebow.

The city that has already been plagued by “Linsanity” headlines for weeks has now been besieged by what unimaginative copy editors are calling “Timsanity.”

More than 200 reporters showed up at Tebow’s first Jets press conference (yes, I am trying to guess which 200 publications sent someone).

I hope that wherever Osama bin Laden is receiving his eternal reward of living with 72 versions of how his young wife could not protect him from the soldiers he once called “Paper Tigers,” he gets to see for just a moment New York the way it is now.

It would be fun to watch him see that the city he targeted twice continues to be – in its own strange way and with horrifyingly lame headlines – the sassy, trash-talking success it was before anyone knew bin Laden’s name.

He thought he was bringing the city to its knees; he never imagined New York Tebowing.