Lupica: Michael Strahan enters Pro Football Hall of Fame as one of New York's ...

This was the night, this great Saturday night up in lights, when Michael Strahan officially entered the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, to fully appreciate everything he did rushing the quarterback for the Giants and everything he has done in television since. And to fully appreciate at the same time how few stars quite like this have ever come out of sports in New York.

'An improbable Hall of Famer,' is the way he described himself in his Hall of Fame speech.

He came from a military childhood in Germany and from Texas Southern to become the second-best defensive player the Giants ever had, after the great Lawrence Taylor. He holds the NFL's single-season sack record. He was right in the middle of things the night in Arizona when the Giants won the biggest game they have ever won - and the last game he ever played - against the 18-0 New England Patriots. He went from there to a big job on Fox's Sunday football show, and co-hosting 'Live with Kelly and Michael' with Kelly Ripa.

Now comes the Hall of Fame for him. You decide who has ever had a better run than this out of football in New York and Jersey, all the way to Canton, Ohio, somebody as famous for what he has done since football as he was for getting after quarterbacks the way he did. It was like this for Frank Gifford once.

'He hit me all day,' a Super Bowl quarterback named Kurt Warner once said of Strahan, and summed up what Strahan did to quarterbacks across his 15-year career as anybody ever did or could.

Somehow, in front of our eyes, Strahan became a football immortal, and found his own lofty place in Giants history, of which there is plenty, all the way back to 1925. He is the guy who rushed the quarterback for the Giants from defensive end after Lawrence Taylor did that same thing as an outside linebacker, as tough an act as anyone could ever have to follow. Strahan still made history of his own.

And he did it talking like he did late Saturday night, don't worry, not always endearing himself to his coaches or his own fans. You think back now, to all the post-game interviews when the lights would go up and be on Strahan, and it was as if he already knew where he was going, and not just to the Hall of Fame in Canton. He was always full of big ideas about himself, never limiting his dreams or his ambitions to putting quarterbacks down on Sunday afternoons.

David Duprey/AP

I remember him best of all on the field at Texas Stadium, after the second win of the Giants' amazing run to that Super Bowl in Phoenix, after the Giants had upset the 13-3 Cowboys that day. The Cowboys' crowd had gone quiet once the game ended. And there was this moment, in front of the Giants bench, Strahan laughing and yelling up into that crowd and pointing at them and telling them the Giants were on their way to Green Bay, when it seemed that the only voice in the place you could hear was his. It was that way a lot in his years as a Giant.

He was a loud, tough, flashy, brilliant football player, and all those who thought that his whole act was just sacking the other team's quarterback were watching the wrong movie. Ernie Accorsi, who would later draft Eli Manning, came here after Strahan was already a Giant, but had a front-row seat to the rest of Strahan's career, really all the way to the Canyon of Heroes after the Giants beat the Patriots. As Strahan said, they'd stomped the Patriots out.

'People who thought they could run at him,' Accorsi told me the other day, 'would end up looking at second-and-10.'

Elsa/Getty Images

Of course there was some controversy in 2001 when Strahan broke the single-season sack record, getting his last one against Brett Favre and the Packers, just because Favre looked as if he took a dive. But nobody was going to take down the guy who took down all those quarterbacks. Strahan, being Strahan, would always say, 'If you've got a problem, break it.'

Meaning his record. No one yet has. Now he is the Hall of Famer who has become this kind of television personality, at the age of 42. It is all still ahead of him in television the way it was in football once. But on this night in Ohio, he was not Strahan of the Fox football show, or the one who sits there every morning with Kelly Ripa.

'This is not TV Michael,' he said in Canton. 'This is the football Michael.'

He was, once more, a great Giant. There have been other famous football lives in New York. Few better, or louder, or more improbable, than his. One last time - his words now - the big man stomped it out.