Super Bowl XLII 'Championship Clinching' Touchdown Game Used Ball

This ball comes directly from the Collection of Plaxico Burress

Few footballs in the history of the game carry the weight of this one. This is the ball from the final touchdown of Super Bowl XLII, the play that put the Giants ahead 17-14 and sealed one of the most stunning upsets the sport has ever seen over the New England Patriots. It comes directly from Plaxico Burress, the man who hauled in Eli Manning's pass for the game-winning score.

The ball has been photomatched to this Super Bowl clinching touchdown on February 3, 2008 by MeiGray and SIA Photo Match.

To appreciate the magnitude of this football, you need to know what stood between the Giants and the title. The Patriots arrived in Glendale already crowned, at least unofficially, as the greatest team to ever take the field. They had spent every single week of the 2007 season ranked number one, from the preseason straight through to the Super Bowl. New England wasn't just chasing another title, their fourth since 2001, they were chasing perfection: a 19-0 record that no team in NFL history had ever achieved. Their 16-0 regular season was the first of its kind since the league expanded to sixteen games back in 1978, and they had shattered scoring records along the way, piling up 589 points and 75 touchdowns while building a point differential of plus-315.

The Giants, by contrast, had clawed their way to the Super Bowl the hard way. They became just the third team ever, and the first from the NFC, to reach the championship by winning three straight playoff games on the road, knocking off Tampa Bay, then stunning the top-seeded Cowboys in Dallas, then surviving a brutal overtime win in Green Bay that remains one of the coldest games ever played, in what turned out to be Brett Favre's final game with the Packers.

So, when New England and New York met for the title, the Giants were sent in as twelve-point underdogs against a team many considered the best ever assembled. For most of the game, it looked like the doubters were right, with both defenses dominating in a low-scoring battle.

Then the fourth quarter arrived. David Tyree opened the period with a touchdown catch, only for Randy Moss to answer right back, putting New England ahead 14-10 with under three minutes to play. The perfect season looked all but complete.

What followed has been replayed countless times, including the now-legendary "Helmet Catch" by Tyree that kept the Giants' final drive alive against all odds. A few plays later, with the crowd on its feet and the Patriots' bid for immortality hanging by a thread, Burress slipped past his defender on a slant-and-go and Manning delivered the throw that would define the moment. The 13-yard touchdown gave the Giants a 17-14 lead they would never relinquish, capping a drive that turned a heavily favored dynasty's perfect season into one of the great heartbreaks in sports history.

This is the football from that exact play, a piece of the moment that ended a perfect season and completed one of the greatest Cinderella stories the NFL has ever told.