The long, grueling Giants descent has finally claimed my fandom

To quote the intrepid mariner, Popeye the Sailor: “That’s all I can stands, ’cause I can’t stands no more!” I grew up an unshakable Giants football fan.Good times, bad times.

Allie Sherman to Ray Handley to Brian Daboll.I was No.

16, Frank Gifford, in the fall and winter, No.16 Whitey Ford in the spring and summer.

(I could stand in front of a mirror and become a lefty like Ford.) But it’s over.This past Sunday, after the Giants’ drag-arse loss at home to Washington, I filed for an open-ended separation. I’m not the most dignified boy on the block, but the Giants are now beneath my dignity.

It wasn’t that the Giants lost or that I can no longer indulge Daniel Jones — when’s the last time he was able to set up in an uninvaded pocket? — but instead it’s the way they lose or occasionally win. It’s the way they behave.They’re as stomach-turning as the rest of preening, muscle-flexing, chest-beating players who comprise NFL teams — players with no sense of modesty, game circumstances and professionalism. Their devotion is to post-play TV cameras, slo-mo TV tape machines, TV advertisers and promo splicers who have determined for all of us that moving images of skilled football be replaced with tired sights of players in self-smitten, often rehearsed acts of all-about-me selfishness. During the week, they feed antisocial media with vulgarities, boasts, taunts, threats, semi-literacy and other reminders that their years spent in colleges were based on institutionalized fraud. The Giants’ swing toward the insufferable began in 2014 with the arrival of since-transient Odell Beckham Jr.

— a talented but self-entitled brat who mimed a dog urinating in the end zone and was even banned from his college team’s activities after, as an NFL player, he tried to steal the scene by playing the center-stage fool in LSU’s national championship locker room. His full devotion to his profession was witnessed in the days before the Giants�...