ARLINGTON, Texas — Surely it couldn’t end like this, with this kind of view for Stevie Brown, right? After the run he’s had the past few weeks, after the day he had yesterday, after the way he’s evolved, like magic, into Big-Play Brown?
“Your heart stops a little,” Brown said, smiling.
Brown was everywhere yesterday, which is exactly right, because he’s been everywhere every week, ever since he was forced into the starting lineup against the Browns 22 days ago. There was an interception and recovered fumble against Cleveland. There was another pick against Robert Griffin III last week.
Yesterday? Yesterday, it seemed Brown — on his third team in three NFL seasons — was intent on torturing the Cowboys all by himself. Dallas turned the ball over six times and Brown was responsible for half of them, two picks and a fumble recovery, to go along with a team-high six tackles.
“It just feels like he knows to be in the right place every time,” said Jason-Pierre Paul, who knows a thing or two about that himself, who plucked a Tony Romo screen pass out of the sky early in the second quarter yesterday as the Giants roared to a 23-0 lead. “He has a nose for where the ball is going to be.”
And now, his nose told him there was big trouble afoot, that all of those heroics were about to be reduced to a footnote, that this strange, inexplicable football game was going to take one final and unacceptable twist. It had been 23-0 Giants, and then 24-23 Cowboys, and now the Giants clung to a 29-24 lead and there was a football in the air, the last desperate heave of a desperate team …
Only what Brown saw was nauseating. Dez Bryant was streaking under the ball. Two Giants — cornerbacks Corey Webster and Michael Coe — were converging on him, but weren’t going to beat him to the ball. Safety Tyler Sash was in the vicinity, too. And now Stevie Brown started sprinting to the spot, too, out of instinct rather than any actual usefulness.
So he saw it — the ball falling in Bryant’s hands — and heard it — Cowboys Stadium, 94,067 strong, exploding in a joyous burst — and he felt, well, awful.
“You’re taught to keep that play in front of you,” he said. “And then, somehow, a guy gets behind …”
He was smiling as he talked, because the Giants are living on the sunny side of the street these days, the side where game-winning touchdowns magically become game-turning incompletions once they’re filtered through the review booth. If they’d played this game under a different star, then the 23-0 starting point would’ve represented both the Cowboys’ greatest all-time comeback and the Giants’ all-time worst regular-season collapse.
But they played this game on a star, the blue one at midfield, on a field where the Giants are now 4-for-4, and so Brown could afford to smile, could afford to exhale, could afford to join his teammates in a hurried rush to make the airport, trying to beat Hurricane Sandy to New Jersey.
“It’s good to contribute,” he said. “It’s good to answer when your team asks you to step up.”
It isn’t lost on Brown that if not for Kenny Phillips’ injury, he wouldn’t have been able to have the profound impact he’s had on the Giants’ four-game winning streak that’s pushed them into firm control of the NFC East at 6-2, two full games ahead of the pack. It also doesn’t bother him.
“I’m just keeping Kenny’s seat warm for him,” Brown said. “When he comes back, I’ll find other ways to help out. I’m good with that.”
It is, of course, a perfect summation for who this team is, and why it hums along so steadily. We see it on the other side of the ball every week, receivers coming and going, limping off and sprinting on, and Eli Manning figuring out a way to make it all work, even in games (like this one) where he looks almost mortal.
So it is on defense, too. On the game’s defining possession — the Cowboys’ penultimate chance — with Antrel Rolle out, with stopgaps everywhere in the secondary, the Giants forced a virtual goal-line stand, choking off the Cowboys on second-and-1, third-and-1 and fourth-and-1 from the Giants 19, the drive ending — where else? — in Stevie Brown’s hands. In the right place. Every time.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com