Weighing Pain of Traffic for Preseason Games Traffic is as much a part of the modern sports experience as the game itself, but not all event congestion is created equal. There is the nervous horn-honking excitement that accompanies the slog toward a stadium before a playoff game. There is the why-did-I-pay-to-watch-that disgust after a blowout defeat. There is the fury directed toward the car that blew a tire 500 feet from the parking gates. Then there are the emotions exclusive to this juncture of the sporting calendar, when fans starving for football brave highway backups for the privilege of watching Eli Manning play not even a half for the Giants on Sunday night against the Indianapolis Colts. Those feelings are a bit more nuanced. Maybe anticipation tinged with some existential awareness. After all, there is a certain endearing absurdity to sitting in a car, MetLife Stadium in sight, staring at an endless string of brake lights that is preventing you from arriving in time to watch a game that, in the scheme of things, means absolutely, positively nothing. The act itself is by no means a bad thing, nor is it terribly surprising, since the appeal of attending preseason games is obvious: the weather is warmer, the tickets are less expensive and more accessible and, for younger fans, there is no school the next day to compel an earlier bedtime. Dick Snyder, a longtime Giants season-ticket holder from Kinnelon, N.J., had time to ponder all of this Sunday while stuck in the morass known as Route 3. Snyder usually arrives at least two hours before games, as he plans to do on Saturday night, when the roadways very well might be clogged again before the Giants play the Jets at 7. Last weekend, he had to drop off his daughter in Newark, where she was catching a train, and so he left the station about 5:35 p.m. for the game. Zipping north on Route 21, Snyder expected to encounter a bit of traffic, but nothing like what he confronted after exiting onto eastbound Route 3. He thought it would abate after the merge. An hour later, he was running up the escalator at MetLife Stadium, reaching his seat in Section 113 about 15 seconds before the kickoff at 7, he said. "My first thought was go home," Snyder said. Why did I do this? This is a preseason game. I should go home and watch it on TV. But I'm too loyal a fan. There he sat, stuck. He would have been stranded even longer had he not, as he sheepishly admitted, driven on the shoulder to bypass other frustrated drivers. "I thought I might miss the first quarter," Snyder said. If I hadn't gotten there until the second quarter, I might have turned around. That thought never entered the mind of Alec Serban, a Giants fan from Summit, N.J., who left his home at 6 p.m. thinking he would have enough time to greet some friends in the parking lot before going inside. He realized he was wrong about a half-hour into the bumper-to-bumper jam that confronted him on westbound Route 3. "I was shocked at the level of traffic," said Serban, who attends about one game every season. Usually, you drive right in. Larry Minda, the chief of the East Rutherford Police Department, said he did not want to comment directly on the traffic around the stadium last weekend, when the Jets hosted the Jacksonville Jaguars on Saturday night, because he was not in town. But speaking generally, he said that during the regular season the traffic flows well, with limited backups, and is much better than for one-time events, like concerts and soccer matches, when drivers are not as familiar with the area. It is, perhaps, a commentary on the inconsequential nature of the preseason that traffic jams are as much a topic of conversation afterward as the game itself. Billy Stanek left his home in New Providence, N.J., at 6:15 p.m. knowing that he was cutting it close, but he had no trouble getting to the Giants" game in time. It was only a few hours later, when he departed early in the fourth quarter and saw a parking lot that was basically empty, that he was subject to the kind of mayhem that Snyder and Serban dealt with on the way there. Stanek listened to the end of the game on the radio, chatting with a friend about some players who impressed them, but they were also amazed at the number of cars on the road. "We were like, "Wow, this is pretty crazy," " Stanek said. It was like after a 1 o'clock game against the Cowboys. It can get competitive, bragging about your preseason traffic nightmares. You sat for an hour on Route 17? Please, I moved three feet in 30 minutes on the Turnpike and missed the Jets" first half. On second thought... There also could be some hidden benefits to sitting there with little else to do but tap the brake pedal every 20 seconds. Think about all the other things that you could be doing that would be more meaningful, like filing your nails, playing the license plate game, cramming for a fantasy football draft, calling your mother, calling your mother's mother, calling your mother-in-law. Then again, there are ways to avoid the aggravation altogether. Just ask Liam Castro, a Giants fan from Woodside, Queens. "The parking lots open five hours before the game," Castro said. That's when I always get there.