Do yourself a favor Sunday if the Giants are your football team: Enjoy the day. Luxuriate in the day. Open the faucet and let your optimism flood your basement. Seriously. There will be plenty of time for jaded. There will be plenty of time for cynical, and skeptical, plenty of time to gripe and simmer and percolate, if that’s the way things go. 

Do yourself a favor: Save the percolating. 

Save the fatalism. 

It’s Opening Day, and anything can happen, the season is an open book, the path ahead is not predetermined or predestined. It’s Opening Day and you are allowed to believe that maybe, just maybe, the Giants are due for one of those charmed seasons that just falls out of the sky every once in a while, the one you never saw coming, the one no one saw coming. 

On Opening Day, everything is possible. 

Because anything is possible. 

So yes, spend the day peering through your rose-colored glasses. Spend the day in Pollyanna’s place. Until proven otherwise, you are allowed to believe that this is the year things will make a turn for the good at 1925 Giants Drive. 

Sunday, if no other day, you can believe that Daniel Jones will figure it all out, put it all together, deliver a season that defines him as the future and not merely a stopgap. He has a new offense, a new coordinator, a new head coach, Brian Daboll, whose arrival energized the whole team. It seems to have transformed Jones as much as anyone. 

“He’s just always thinking. He’s always thinking about a new way to run this play or a new way to motion something or shift something or set it up — and that’s constant with him,” Jones said of Daboll. “It’s in the cafeteria, it’s through the hallways, obviously in meeting rooms. He’s always thinking, coming up with new ideas. That’s been fun, you learn a lot that way as I am learning the system, but also the way he thinks about football, how he sees offense and setting us up to be successful.” 

Maybe Sunday, if no other day, we will see the version of Saquon Barkley who electrified the whole league when he was a rookie: the breathtaking cuts, the blinding speed, the ability to find small apertures in the line and power through for huge gains. Is that too much to ask? Maybe it is. Today, it seems like an altogether proper request. 

“I feel really good,” Barkley said last week. “I’m at a way better place mentally and physically. Just a whole other year away from surgery. It’s about to be two years in 20 days, something like that. I’m excited, I’m excited, but the reason why I’m really so excited is to just go out there and start playing football, start having some success so I can really stop answering questions about my health.” 

Fair enough. That’s also something to hope for, on this day of all days. 

So is this: a defense that will honor the Giants’ rich legacy. Do they have the personnel to pull that off yet? Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. We’ll see. They do have a coordinator, Wink Martindale, who comes with a golden résumé and a sparkling reputation. Sometimes, that’s a good place to start. It was with Tom Landry, once upon a time. It was with Bill Parcells, and then Bill Belichick. It was with Steve Spagnuolo. 

“It’s a culture of defense,” Martindale said. “There’s one thing I’ll guarantee you: I don’t know how good we’re going to be, but we are going to run to the football, and we are going to tackle people. If we start with that, you’ve got a shot. And I can’t wait. I’m really excited about it.” 

If it’s good enough for Wink, it ought to be good enough for you, Sunday of all days. Same as Daboll’s fresh voice should be. Early returns have been good, why can’t later returns be great? Sunday, of all days, why can’t you hope for that? 

“We’re ready,” Daboll said this week. “We’re ready to start this thing, see what we have.” 

What will they have? Maybe Monday we can start thinking clearly again. But for now, for Sunday, for Opening Day? Is there any harm in hope? Is there any downside to dreaming? Sunday of all days.