Bottom line on glide: Making either LGA or TEB would have been an "experiment" with no bailout option if things began to look bad at 500 feet and at least 155 lives at stake, not counting unfortunate souls beneath the glide path (or lack thereof).
And would have ended in a touchdown with zero reverse thrust available (and maybe no spoilers/speedbrakes) on not especially long runways with perhaps more than normal speed and less than normal flaps. (Someone will haul out the book here and 'prove' that a 320 can stop in x-many feet with no reverse. Fine. Willing to bet your life?)
Bottom line on "heroes": The crew were simply doing their jobs, competently.
But after a decade of extremely public incompetence in many walks of life, people simply doing their jobs competently looks pretty heroic.