NFL

Remaining schedule will reveal Giants’ true colors

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There’s little that’s fun about playing a team who’s 0-6, who’s playing out the string, whose coach has officially left the hot seat and shifted over to the professional gallows, whose quarterback is keeping the position warm for someone who hasn’t even been drafted yet.

No, playing the Dolphins can make for a torturous day, and it felt that way. The crowd at MetLife Stadium, 79,302 strong, started the day in a bad mood and only got grouchier from there. The Giants’ offense seemed indifferent for most of the first half, and the defense played as if it were still on sabbatical.

And, well . . . that’s the part that’s fun about playing an 0-6 team, because you can spend most of the day with your mind only partially focused on the business at hand and you can still come away with a 20-17 victory, and then you can walk away praising Tony Sparano (as Tom Coughlin, always a gracious winner, did) and offering respect for the vanquished Dolphins (these are the blue-cloaked football players in town, not the green) and begging off most questions about the varsity portion of the schedule, which begins next week.

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“Can we enjoy this one first, perhaps talk about that at another time?” Coughlin said, laughing, when the first volley of questions about his team’s coming nine-week task started landing like grenades.

“One at a time. One at a time.”

Yes, we can grant Coughlin that. Heck, we’re generous: We’ll even wait until Wednesday before we start to mount the inevitable full-scale reckoning on where the Giants are and where they’re headed. For starters that means New England, in Foxborough next Sunday, the first time the Giants and the Patriots will see each other on the same field since their epic encounter in the Super Bowl nearly four years ago.

“Maybe if we’d played each other the next year, or the year after, it would have a little more meaning for both teams,” Giants guard Chris Snee said. “But there’s a lot of turnover in this league, a lot of different players on both teams.”

Really, though, this renewal of hostilities is just a cover story for what truly lies ahead for the Giants, whose relief at being 5-2 this morning was tangible, especially when you ponder the 17-10 deficit they faced at the start of the fourth quarter. Because it tells you something about the difficulty of their remaining nine games that the only one that looks like a gimme — home for the Redskins in seven weeks — comes against a team that’s already beaten them this year.

Between now and then lie road trips at New England, San Francisco, New Orleans and Dallas (combined record before yesterday: 20-6) and home games against the Packers (7-0) and the Eagles (who, if nothing else, have proven invulnerable in East Rutherford in recent years). Then comes a Christmas Eve throwdown with the Jets, and a finale at home to the Cowboys that the Giants certainly hope will be a win-and-get-in proposition.

That’s all?

That’s all.

“What we have always said is that if we take care of our own business, everything else will take care of itself,” cornerback Corey Webster said. “Taking care of our business means winning football games, and it doesn’t matter how you do it or if people were impressed by how you did it. Our goal was to beat the Miami Dolphins today and get to 5-2, and that’s what we did.”

They did. They were helped by a phantom offensive interference penalty on Brandon Marshall that snuffed a Dolphins’ drive when Miami still had the lead, and helped more by the fact that when the defense really needed to impose its will on Miami quarterback Matt Moore, it pushed him into a hopeless third-and-30 hole on his final possession. Miami just marking time, after all, and Dolphins fans won’t exactly be disconsolate by the outcome.

The Giants have stronger ambitions. The seven-game preliminary ended yesterday. Varsity play begins next week. The Giants should be equal to that task. The proof will be in the play.

michael.vaccaro@nypost.com