Keith Hamilton is bounding through the Giants Stadium locker room, waving a walking cane over his head and bellowing, "Strahan. Where's Strahan?" The Giants' defensive end, a three-time Pro Bowler whose locker is clear across the room, knows what's coming as soon as Hamilton spies him in the corner. "There you are," the big tackle says coyly. Then, proving that he's a student of timing, he waits a beat, waves the thick cane, and cracks, "I got your toothpick for ya, Strahan."

The Giants locker room goes to pieces, and no one laughs harder than the gap-toothed Strahan, who put so much pressure on Daunte Culpepper during the Giants' 41-0 rout of the Vikings in the NFC championship game that the quarterback is probably still in a hyperbaric chamber. "I'm not pretty like Bruce Smith and I don't have all the moves like Warren Sapp," Strahan will tell you. But ask John Runyan, the Eagles' trash-talking right tackle, what it felt like to be torched for two sacks and three tackles in the divisional playoff game, and he'll say, "You can't be a step late on a guy like that."

After watching Strahan use his 275 pounds to brush past the 330-pound Runyan, Mike Maser, Jacksonville's offensive line coach, looked on with stunned admiration and said, "I've never seen anyone push Runyan around like that. Right now, Strahan is the best pressure player in the league."

No.92 may not tower above the Giants' fifth-ranked defense the way Ray Lewis does over the Ravens' second-ranked unit, but the double-teams that the 29-year-old Strahan routinely draws are a big reason why Hamilton is having a career year, why team captain Jessie Armstead notched his fifth straight hundred-tackle season-and why the Giants are in the Super Bowl.

The trio, who've been playing together for eight seasons, are survivors on a defense that has seen more than its share of disappointment-a point that Armstead, an eight-year vet who won a national title at Miami, hammered home before the NFC championship game. Looking around the locker room, he fixed his sights on 37-year-old offensive lineman Lomas Brown and declared, "I owe you, Lomas, because you've been waiting the longest for this shot." Then he turned to seventh-year cornerback Jason Sehorn. "But Sehorn, you owe me. And you other young guys, you owe all of us."

Strahan nodded, thinking about his own long road to Super Bowl XXXV. Having grown up the son of an army officer stationed in Mannheim, Germany, he hadn't been stud-farmed by the football factories. In fact, the only person who seemed to believe he had a football future was his father, an 82nd Airborne paratrooper whose brother, Art, played defensive end for the Houston Oilers. When Michael was 17, Major Gene Strahan crisply commanded his son to live with his uncle in Houston, play football and get a scholarship. ("My dad didn't say 'try.'") Michael lettered one year at Westbury High in suburban Houston, then returned to Germany to get his diploma. Because of his meager football credentials, the only school to offer him a scholarship was Texas Southern, a historically black university in downtown Houston not exactly famous for turning out NFL draft picks.

Far from the media spotlight, Strahan tackled his way to Southwest Athletic Conference honors in his senior year and earned a first-team mention in a publication called The Poor Man's Guide to the NFL Draft. But getting picked 40th overall by the Giants, going to three Pro Bowls and becoming the third-highest-paid player in the NFL? No, that was never in the cards.

"I couldn't understand why the Giants wanted me," he says. "All I knew was that it was cold in New York, and they had Lawrence Taylor. So I showed up, played behind LT, and kept my mouth shut."

Strahan's star rose in the seasons of 1997 and 1998, when he totaled 29 sacks with a style that reminded some observers of a young Reggie White. "He's got the same hard, fast move inside as Reggie," says Cowboys offensive line coach Hudson Houck. "He comes upfield, gets you off balance, then power rushes you sideways so he can throw you into the quarterback. It's classic."

Last season, Giants GM Ernie Accorsi decided to invest $32.5 million over four years in No.92 because he figured Strahan's natural speed and strength-along with his Beanie-Baby looks, quip-a-minute personality and genuine commitment to charitable causes-would make him the face of a team that hadn't had a megawatt defensive star since Taylor retired in 1993.

George Young, the man whom Accorsi replaced, supported the move but, as always when the Giants have given out big contracts, he held his breath, warning, "You never know what it will do to a guy."

Strahan's small-town, army-brat roots gave no hint of how much he'd fallen in love with the big city, not to mention with a smart blonde named Jean from North Dakota, who was managing a skin-care boutique on Madison Avenue in Manhattan when he first spotted her.

"He showed up every week for a month to buy soaps," she says. "I figured he either was really clean or was trying to ask me out." Together for seven years and married for one, the Strahans are staples of the New York good-cause scene, most notably in their work with Kenneth Cole and his wife, Maria Cuomo-Cole, for HELP USA (an organization to aid the homeless founded by Andrew Cuomo, Maria's brother).

An antiques addict who taught Michael the art of relaxing in French period furniture, Jean has also assumed responsibility for her husband's karma. She has introduced him to yoga, to Rolfing therapy, to acupuncture ("When I first met Michael, he thought it was voodoo," she says) and to a motivational hypnotist in Arizona who made the tape he goes to sleep with the night before big games, the one that tells him to "visualize feeling strong and going through the quarterback."

But when Strahan's new contract made him the highest-paid player on the Giants, his karma cratered: "I felt that I had to be the one to do it all for the team, like I had to be fired up all the time." When a rash of injuries-a pair of hyperextended elbows, a bruised knee, a torn thumb-caused his sack stats to nose-dive, what had been a casual, bantering relationship with reporters became tense, then frosty. "It's amazing," Strahan says, "how you can go from loving everything about the game to hating everything about it so quickly."

The Giants, meanwhile, were going through a civil war that spilled into the press when Armstead accused the offense of failing to match the intensity of the defense. (He insists he was just as hard on his own guys, but says that part didn't get reported.) Intent on combating his milquetoast image, a furious Fassel gagged Armstead. Strahan defended his friend in an 80-minute screed to reporters during which he unloaded on Fassel, insisting that the third-year coach was trying to strip the Giants of its veteran leaders. His timing was even worse than his words. He delivered the message when Fassel was out of town-burying his mother. A Giant official called the sneak attack "despicable."

"Look, this team went through a stretch where defensively we weren't at full strength, yet we were taking the brunt of the criticism," Strahan says, clearly embarrassed by it all. "It was like, after seven years of carrying the offense, 'Give us a break when we need one.'" But, he allows, "things got out of hand." He was called into Fassel's office, reminded of his place and sent out to apologize before the media. He calls it "my lowest moment in football."

After the season ended with the Giants at 7-9, Strahan made an appointment to see Fassel. Strahan had prepared a list of talking points for the meeting, the essence of which was: I'm tired of being angry; you need me and I need you. Fassel was going through his own period of soul-searching. "I had a bad year," he says. "I admit it. I needed to establish myself more as a head coach." Three hours after they sat down to face one another, Strahan asked for a truce. (Eventually, Armstead reached his own armistice with Fassel. "We agreed the sidelines are his," Armstead says, "but the locker room is mine.") Looking back, Strahan says the whole ugly affair "was uncomfortable for both of us. But it forced the issue of my role on this team. I'm here as a player, not as a coach."

Still, it took half a season before Strahan started showing the side of himself that Giants defensive coordinator John Fox needed to see. After the first five games of 2000, Strahan had only 2.5 sacks, and reporters lingering around his locker began using the dreaded word: slump. Strahan finally snapped back: "Go to school and learn the game-I'm not in a slump!"

On the way home that night after the outburst, Jean looked over at him driving with a clenched jaw and said, "You don't have that many years left, Michael. Your career's too short to spend it this angry."

Strahan credits his wife's remark, which she made three games before Fassel's much-ballyhooed guarantee that the Giants would make it to the playoffs, for turning his season around. Of course, it also helped Strahan and the Giants defense that the team went through the year without a quarterback controversy, and that an improved offensive line helped boost the Giants from tied-for-24th in rushing last season to 11th. Now that the defense is getting the help it had cried out for a year ago, the star defensive end and the head coach have become positively mushy.

Strahan: "I love that man."

Fassel: "Michael's intentions were good last year. He said I needed better people. And I did. I think he got hit too hard for that."

Really, guys, get a room. Giants linebacker Mike Barrow rolls his eyes when he quips, "We call Strahan 'Baby Mouth,' because he spends so much time suckin' up."

But Strahan is seriously jazzed by the Giants' newfound balance: "I've never played on a team where the guys on defense would be high-fiving the offense when they come off the field." Let alone one with a quarterback who passed for two touchdowns before the defense ever took the field in a big game, as Kerry Collins did against the Vikings. "There's no question," says Strahan, "that our improvement on offense has made me an all-around better player."

So has shaking off his obsession with sacks. "Sacks are red herrings," says Jacksonville's Maser. "They're a matter of being in the right place at the right time. What matters is being able to put vertical pressure on the quarterback. It's the waterwheel effect, always turning. Strahan is always turning."

Ask Strahan about the Jaguar's chatty Fred Taylor, who boasted that the Giants blitzed to make up for their lack of talent, and he starts giggling, then moves into a full-bore, body-rattling guffaw that makes his head bob up and down, the kind of deep belly laugh the Giants hadn't heard from him in a while.

"I'm in my eighth year in this league," he says. "I'm tired of feeling pressure. If guys like Taylor want to trash-talk me, let them feel it." Taylor felt it when he was forced from the game in the third quarter. With the exception of a breakaway 44-yard touchdown run, Strahan and the Giants defense held him to eight yards on 12 carries in a 28-25 win.

After the startling blowout of the Vikings, the Giants locker room was overrun with the usual smattering of celebs and scene-makers. One, nestled by Strahan's locker, was the producer of a curious album released last year called NFL Country. Somehow Strahan, an amateur R&B singer, had wandered into the session and talked his way into recording a duet with, of all people, Randy Travis. This time, Strahan and the producer were huddling over plans to syndicate a pre-Super Bowl talk show, with Strahan in the Jay Leno seat.

Perfect. If things go Michael Strahan's way in Tampa, he's sure to have the last laugh.

This article appears in the February 5 issue of ESPN The Magazine.