NFL

JETS CONFIDENT, ARE YOU?

MIDWEEK in Florham Park, and there are no signs of distress, no signals of fear and/or loathing. No hint of terror. No trace of fear. There is even the sound of . . . gasp . . . laughter here, deep in the woods of North Jersey.

While Jets fans sit and shiver and shimmy and shake, waiting for the other shoe to drop (not an unfounded fear because, let’s face it, for three weeks shy of 40 years, the other shoe always has dropped), the people who occupy Jets jerseys for a living sure look cheerier than the ones who drop $79.99 for them at Modell’s.

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“I think that I have to be honest and tell you that I’m really confident, as I should be,” said Brett Favre, who has taken in a rodeo or three in his day. “I would hope that if you polled every one of the players in that locker room they would say the same thing. I think confidence is one of the keys to success.”

Nobody from Gallup or Quinnipiac was available to process those polls yesterday, but the mood was bright and the outlook sunny, even if the early forecast in Seattle Sunday calls for snow and temperatures in the 20s. Even the coach, not someone you would ever expect to see at New Talent Night at Caroline’s, was in an especially chipper mood.

“You can get a nickname one year and get a revised nickname the next year,” the coach formerly known as Mangenius said, though to be perfectly accurate he doesn’t have a new-nickname problem among Jets fans these days so much as an epithet problem.

That’s the way it should be around the Jets, because with two games left in the season, they are exactly where everyone always wants to be this late in any season: in control one’s own destiny. This isn’t always such a marvelous thing, as evidenced by these two random quotes plucked out of the recent past:

“We are in control of our own destiny.” (David Wright, Sept. 25, 2007).

“We have our destiny in our hands.” (David Wright, Sept. 23, 2008).

OK. So maybe those aren’t so random. Still, just because the Jets’ ancient baseball cousins managed to squander the destiny that was clutched so firmly in their hands the past two years, it is still better to have it than to not have it.

Would you rather be the Jets right now or the Eagles, for instance? It is safe to say that no playoff contender in the AFC has struggled more than the Jets the past three weeks, and Favre has been limping hauntingly toward the finish line. It is safe to say that no contender in the NFC has soared more than the resurgent Eagles the past three weeks, and Donovan McNabb looks as if he has had a Fountain of Youth I.V. installed in his arm.

Yet this is what has to happen for the Eagles to squeeze in the playoffs:

1. They have to beat the Redskins on the road and the Cowboys (who may well be playing a win-and-in game themselves) at home.

2. They need to hope the Bucs lose at home to either the Chargers (unlikely) or the Raiders (impossible).

3. Or they need the Falcons to lose at Minnesota (the best-case scenario of all) or at home to the Rams (and you, me, Serby and eight strangers couldn’t lose at home to the Rams).

Out of the question? Of course not. But it will involve two weeks of teeth gritting and two weeks of borrowing the time-honored baseball tradition of scoreboard watching. The Jets? Just win. Twice. And even that’s not impossible, because a Ravens loss in the last-ever game at Texas Stadium likely keeps the Jets alive for a wild-card berth even if they fall in Seattle.

The Jets know all of that. They seem confident. They sound confident. “We are confident,” Favre said.

Are you?

michael.vaccaro@nypost.com