PHILADELPHIA – All time, all motion, all reason seemed to freeze as Eagles kicker David Akers clobbered the football with the side of his left foot, as the ball approached the yellow goal posts, as the 68,594 people inside Lincoln Financial Field unleashed one final roar, as the Giants held their breath on one sideline and the Eagles prepared to explode on the other . . .
Doink!
And then the ball kissed the right upright, and then it tumbled harmlessly to the ground, and silence covered most of Greater Philadelphia, and now it was the Giants who could set their voices free. Most of them, anyway. Plaxico Burress, happy as he was, kept the celebration to a minimum, even as his teammates rejoiced in a game to which he had provided a maximum contribution.
“We always make it harder than it needs to be,” Burress would say, much later, after a quick round of postgame treatment on his recalcitrant right ankle, after limping to the podium, after catching seven balls for 136 yards and a touchdown, after providing the most important spark in this workmanlike 16-13 Giants victory that all but salted away the No. 5 seed in the NFC playoffs.
Actually, the degree of difficulty for the Giants shrinks exponentially whenever Burress takes his No. 17 jersey out of the trainer’s room – the place where his teammate, Antonio Pierce, has kidded him it belongs – and puts it on his back, with two reasonably functional wheels carrying him along.
Burress has spent almost the entire season nursing that screaming, screeching ankle, and when you see him hobbling across the locker room in his civvies, you wonder how it’s even remotely possible for him to have
played in all 13 of the Giants’ games thus far. Yet that’s what he has done. He has only occasionally been a reasonable facsimile of himself, and when he suffers the entire offense bears the consequences.
But when he’s on . . .
“I always feel if I can get him the ball,” Eli Manning said, “he’s going to make a play.”
“We always feel he can make something happen for us,” Tom Coughlin said.
All true. But it’s even more than that. Because there are two Elis, and that schizophrenic line is easily drawn: There is the Eli who has Burress as a healthy wingman, and the Eli who doesn’t. With Burress, Manning can take a snap, fall down, find his feet, and still deliver a confident throw, as he did late in the second quarter. With Burress, Manning knows he can audible to a play he has just run – as he did on their TD hookup in the third – and know it won’t matter, because Burress will deliver both of them.
And it’s even more than that.
Because there are exactly two reasons why the Giants are able to fancy themselves legitimate players in the NFC. One is their ability to win on the road. Yesterday was their sixth win away from Giants Stadium in seven games, a victory earned in the midst of the usual cauldron of brotherly Philly warmth – “Lots of one-finger hellos,” as Pierce described it – and that’s important, because every game the Giants play in the postseason will be outside the 201 area code.
That’s a neat skill to own.
But this is a better one: having a gamebreaker, a difference-maker on your roster. And that is Burress’ greatest gift to these Giants. As he showed yesterday, he does a couple of things very well, better than any Giants receiver since, maybe, Homer Jones. He knows how to get open. And he knows how to turn a five-yard gain into 10, a 10 yard gain into 20, a firstdown catch into a touchdown catch. In January, that could mean the difference between one-and-done and something else, something different, possibly something awfully special.
It’s what allows the Giants to dream big dreams, without making them seem like hallucinations. It’s what pushes Burress to rehab three times a day, to acupuncture a couple of times a week, to long hours in the trainer’s room that, he hopes, will liberate him to the practice field before long.
As Coughlin said wistfully yesterday: “It makes you wonder what [Burress and Eli] could do if they were ever able to practice together.”
Maybe. But the evidence of what they’re capable of playing games together, real games, is enough to set the imagination soaring.
michael.vaccaro@nypos.com