It wasn’t just your eyes playing tricks with you the past couple of weeks, you know. The Giants saw what you saw, on game film rather than a network broadcast, with concerned coaches’ voices providing the soundtrack and not a play-by-play man. You didn’t like the way the Giants looked going from 6-2 to 6-4?
“It killed us,” Ahmad Bradshaw said.
You didn’t like the way the bye week felt like a bye month, the Steelers and Bengals conspiring with the week off to make it feel like a year since the last time the Giants won a football game?
“We couldn’t wait to get out here,” Mathias Kiwanuka said. “Couldn’t wait to see what a good week of practice and a renewed focus might bring.”
This is what it brought: a renewed sense of what kind of team the Giants can be, and become, a 38-10 dismantling of the white-hot Packers that, combined with their flattening of the 49ers back in October, means the Giants have outscored two-thirds of last year’s NFC playoff itinerary 64-13, with the Falcons awaiting in Atlanta in three weeks to finish off the troika.
And this: a reminder of who the champions of the world are, where they work, what uniforms they wear. Coach Tom Coughlin and his players were more than happy to credit a 15-year-old Vermonter named Adam Merchant, who thanks to Make-A-Wish delivered that very message to the team at practice on Friday, and again last night.
And that is a beautiful story of the season.
But the truth is, the Giants were simmering at how they’d played the last month, not limited to the losses to Pittsburgh and Cincinnati but including escapes against Washington and Dallas, too. Really, the six weeks connecting the victories against the 49ers and the Packers were six weeks of wandering in the wilderness.
But the two games they bridge?
They are the reminders of what the Giants could be, what they can become, what the rest of the league already knows. They are still the defending champs, after all, just now arriving at December and January, the months in which they have lately done their finest work.
They, more than any football team in recent memory, are the masters at proving just how long the long football season really is. Are you kidding? After 0-2 in 2007, after 7-7 last year, was anyone really worried about 6-4?
“We approached this game,” Coughlin said, “like the first game of a six-week season,” and they played that way, too, pummeling Aaron Rodgers, suffocating the Packers’ offense, taking advantage of the Pack’s wounded defense, perhaps adding one more item that will crowd the Packers’ heads should these team face each other again somewhere down the line.
Whatever it was that was ailing and befuddling Eli Manning — a slump, a dip, a lull, whatever — evaporated long enough to allow him to throw three touchdown passes, making it an even 200 for his career, alone at the top of the Giants’ all-time list, leaving him as pleased as you’ll ever see him with himself: “I felt good, really good tonight.”
He wasn’t alone. By the end, MetLife Stadium was deserted, the good kind of deserted, the kind where 80,365 fans have no compunction about fleeing the yard for the Turnpike, safe in the knowledge Bob Papa and Carl Banks can deliver them home safely on the radio.
“This is more like the way we know we can play,” Victor Cruz said.
There’s still a lot of football between now and January, still quite a few obstacles beginning with the Redskins a week from tonight in Washington. The Giants got beaten up a little last night, and that tempered the joy a smidge.
Still, three days after the Other Team in New York looked quasi-professional in laying down on Thanksgiving Night in this very building, on a night when the Jets’ penchant for absurdity reached an impressive level with their attention-starved superfan, Fireman Ed, announcing he’s tired of the attention …
Well, it was good to see the grown-ups in town still know how to take care of business, take care of themselves. This version of the Giants had been missing for too long. It was good to see it again, right on the doorstep of December.