I spent most of the early part of the week wandering in an existential funk. As fantastic as Super Bowl XLII was, I couldn’t get my mind around it. I had no allegiance to either team, nor did I particularly care who won. But I felt like I, as a football fan, was Pope Urban VII, Tom Coughlin was Galileo, and I’d just been told the earth was not the center of the universe. So many questions left unanswered — had the best team really won? Were the Patriots still one of the greatest ever, or had all 18 victories meant nothing? Had the ruddy-faced Coughlin really outfoxed evil genius Bill Belichick, or had Eli Manning simply gotten lucky? To make matters worse, there would be no next Sunday to set things straight — football season was over, and I had a long time to think. I was a like a ship without a rudder, Robert Downey Jr. without a bottle of booze — I was lost. When the continuous loop of Stuart Scott, Keyshawn Johnson and Emmitt Smith “analyzing” the game on ESPN didn’t rouse me from my dream-like state, I decided I needed someone to talk to — but who? A psychiatrist would tell me that my doubts about the game were really displaced feelings of guilt or anger or longing for my childhood — and miss the point entirely. Would a priest help? Hell, no.

I needed someone who knew his X’s and O’s, a person who had a connection to the game and could help me grasp just how and why this happened.

So I went to talk to our campus pigskin expert in residence — Georgetown football coach Kevin Kelly.

Little did I know that Kelly — who has crossed the contiguous 48 countless times during a 20-year coaching career — had a personal relationship with nearly every actor in this football drama. Steve Spagnuolo — the defensive wizard who found a way to stop Laurence Maroney, limit Randy Moss and floor Tom Brady for the first time since Bridget Moynahan walked in and said, “Tom, baby, we need to talk. ...”

He was Kelly’s teammate at Springfield College in the early 1980s. Watching Spagnuolo celebrate, Kelly remembered the guy he chatted on the phone with when the two were low-level assistants in the Mid-American Conference. Or the guy he kept in contact with while Spagnuolo followed his dream of coaching pro football all the way to NFL Europe. And then on to the Philadelphia Eagles, where he called Kelly for tips about who the team should draft. That was before he got the job with the Giants and became the hottest coaching name in the game.

“Spags is a sharp guy — he’s energetic, he’s enthusiastic,” Kelly said of the man who spurned the Washington Redskins Thursday to become the highest-paid defensive coordinator in football. “If you get your foot in the door, you can really rise quickly — it’s all about opportunity.”

Speaking of opportunities, Kelly got his first from the Giants’ offensive coordinator, Kevin Gilbride, who hired Kelly when Gilbride was the head coach at Southern Connecticut State in1984. Twenty-two years later, Kelly returned the favor, giving Gilbride’s son, Kevin Jr., a job on the Georgetown staff. Gilbride Jr. left after the 2006 season to take a job at Temple, but when New York won the NFC Championship, Kelly called his former boss to congratulate him. He did the same shortly after the upset Sunday night — but Gilbride’s voice mailbox was already full.

Knowing well the brilliant minds guiding the Giants, Kelly wasn’t too shocked to see the game’s final outcome.

“That game didn’t surprise me at all,” Kelly continued. “Spags had a real good game plan.” The secret? Kelly says the mix and match of the zone and man blitzes perplexed the Pats’ O-line all night. That, and a little luck. The guy that made the circus catch on the game-winning drive? Kelly knew David Tyree long before he immortalized himself in Super Bowl lore — Kelly coached him as an assistant at Syracuse.

He became friendly with Moss during his first stint at Marshall in the late 1990s.

“Randy was an unbelievable athlete — the most gifted athlete I have ever seen — and he’s not a bad guy,” Kelly recalled. “Randy is just Randy.”

What about Brady? Was he the best ever?

“He’s up there,” Kelly said. “He’s come a long way since I coached against him when I was at Syracuse. He was just a guy back then — splitting time with Drew Henson.”

Kelly was also happy to see Pats’ seldom-used punter Kris Hanson, another Marshall guy, get some leg time, and Kyle Eckel, who Kelly tutored as special teams coordinator at Navy, make a tackle on a kickoff.

But most of all, he couldn’t seem to get his mind around a memory of the quiet man who had taken him to dinner and promised to put in a good word for him when he was a young coach searching for a job in 1986.

Sunday night, Kelly watched as that man jogged awkwardly off the field one second too early, the same scowl on his face Kelly remembered from that day he watched a New York Giants practice over 20 years before.

It was Belichick.

“He’s just different,” Kelly said when I asked him what he thought about Belichick’s early exit. “He said all there was to say after the game: ‘The Giants made the plays that we didn’t.’ That’s what people don’t understand — it sounds like he’s just saying the same clichés over and over, but that’s what it is — there is such a fine line between winning and losing. If Tyree doesn’t make that catch, if one of those balls Manning chucks up gets picked, the Pats win the game.”

As happy as Kelly was for Spagnuolo, Gilbride and Tyree, he empathized with those on the losing end as well. During his first year at Marshall, the Thundering Herd was 14-0 heading into the Division I-AA Championship game against Montana. Much like the 2007-08 Patriots, no one had come close to beating them all season. But it was the exact same situation Marshall had been in the year before — undefeated and on the verge of greatness — when they were upset in the title game.

“There was so much pressure on us for that one game,” Kelly remembered. “The whole season was for naught if we didn’t win. I’m sure that is exactly what the Patriots feel like now. They were a great team that got off to a great start — but they didn’t win them all.”

After our 15-minute game of six degrees of Super Bowl separation, I left feeling as if I understood this colossal upset a little better. But Kelly couldn’t quell the one question that wouldn’t leave me be; Just what the hell was Ryan Seacrest doing at the Super Bowl?

Harlan Goode is a senior in the College. He can be reached at goode@thehoya.com. The Goode Worde appears every Friday in HOYA SPORTS.