I DREAM IN BLUE is the uproarious and impassioned story of how one middle–aged fan ran away from his everyday life in order to join the ranks of his favorite team on earth: the New York Giants. Director spends the 2006–2007 season up close and personal with Big Blue, in the locker room and on the practice field, schmoozing with fan favorites like Tiki Barber, arguably the league's best running back, who announces mid–way through the season that this will be his last, and famed quarterback Eli Manning, who faces, among other challenges, the pressures imposed on him by his impressive pedigree.

But while the players are propped up by battalions of trainers, doctors, physical therapists, mental health professionals, nutritionists, film technicians, locker room attendants, media advisers and the best of coaches, Director guts it out with Big Blue all on his own –– without even the benefit of getting his ankles taped. Refusing to let anything get in his way –– not his fumble–prone television career, not the very same degenerative hip disease that forced the great Bo Jackson off the gridiron, not even planning his daughter's bat–mitzvah from the road –– he is there with the team from the first snap of summer camp to the final gun of the season. And like the players he adores, he's got only one end in mind: the Super Bowl.

Along the way, Director tells the story of how a family business, founded with only $500 by an Irish bookmaker in the gaudy Prohibition era of Red Grange, Jack Dempsey, Will Rogers, and Babe Ruth, has endured to become an essential component of New York City's heartbeat –– and also the heartbeat of Director, our tour–guide through this great athletic dynasty. Ultimately, I DREAM IN BLUE is the story of a desperate Hail Mary –– a die–hard fan's quest to have one last endzone celebration.

The most important decision you're going to make here today is . . . if, for whatever reason, something terrible happens . . . who do you want to be your daughter's legal guardian?"

The lawyer, Newmark, sits opposite me with a blank lined yellow legal pad and a pen. He looks nothing like what I always imagined the guy putting my affairs in order ought to look like. That lawyer is gray at the temples, somber and distinguished. But Newmark has these little vegetative clumps in odd spots on his pale, scaly scalp; all the groomed gravitas of a vacant lot. Also, he has smallish hands. The capper: He keeps sucking back the saliva he overproduces when he talks.

But I didn't pick Newmark, my wife did. Petite and dark-haired, with a smile the wattage of a ballroom chandelier and a bite like a fer-de-lance, Jan has been trying to get me to sit down with Newmark for months. She's the one who says we need a will.

She wants to make sure our daughter's education is taken care of.

Check. No disagreement there.

Then, understandably, there's making sure that the assets we have will not be taken from her by some humpbacked villain in a black cloak straight out of a silent movie.

No disagreement there. Check.

But a will? Why not hang a sign around my neck saying, Come and Get Me?

So what finally got me here in this conference room looking west over the Pacific Ocean? Maybe it would help to understand if I described how I felt listening to the bagpipes echo on Fifth Avenue that October morning two years ago. How the crowd had gathered outside St. Patrick's Cathedral watching the procession approach.

The crowd was like that for Babe Ruth.

The crowd was like that for Joe DiMaggio.

This crowd was here for a man called the Duke. Wellington Mara. And one could be forgiven for recalling Barbara Tuchman's description of the august funeral procession of Edward VII: "The sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again." Gathered in somber pageantry outside and within St. Patrick's were the heads of the varied principalities that made up the world from which the man they honored, Wellington Mara, the owner of the New York Giants football team, had recently departed.

They were the crowned heads from the empire known as the National Football League. They were bent in sorrow and, in some cases, wrinkled and spotted with age. The field marshals and knights-errant who'd ridden to war between the goal lines. The Hall of Fame New York running back Frank Gifford. The unforgettable quarterback Y. A. Tittle. The Giants' former Super Bowl–winning head coach, Bill Parcells, now coaching the Cowboys. Andy Robustelli, the team's Hall of Fame defensive end from its halcyon squads of the '50s. Harry Carson, the Hall of Fame middle linebacker who was instrumental in the Super Bowl XXI victory. Lawrence Taylor, outside linebacker and Hall of Famer, King Kong talked down off the Empire State Building and given Giants' jersey no. 56. And so many more. Five other owners. Four other head coaches. A former mayor of New York. All 2,200 seats were filled.

The New York Giants stepped off seven chartered buses escorted by a New Jersey state patrol car that pulled up in front of the church. And Wellington Mara's immediate football family, the current New York Giants, solemnly stepped off. They filed up the steps and into the cathedral.

"Amazing Grace" was playing. There's a rose window over the Fifth Avenue door and the door was opened and they carried Mr. Mara's casket down the nave. They placed him before the altar, surrounded by bouquets of red roses.

Mara's son, John, spoke. The kingdom's aging prince, Frank Gifford, looking ashen, offered a eulogy....

Roger Director is a screenwriter and TV producer who is a two-time Emmy and Writers Guild Award nominee for such shows as “NCIS,” “Mad About You,” “Moonlighting,” “Arliss,” and “Hill Street Blues.” His award-winning journalism has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Sports Illustrated, and Espn.com He is the author of the novel A PLACE TO FALL. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter.