This has been a sweet, innocent climb for the Giants: the leadership and steadiness of Brian Daboll, the Saquon Barkley comeback story, the Daniel Jones rise, the Dexter Lawrence breakthrough, the swagger of Wink Martindale … 

In the meantime, fears of Doomsday have arrived without warning but with a vengeance. 

Daboll has been a Coach of the Year candidate from the beginning of his first NFL season as a head coach. 

Now the Giants will need him to be Coach of the Rest of the Year, starting on Thanksgiving against the Cowboys in Jerry Jones’ house. 

Giants fans have much to be thankful for on this Thanksgiving, specifically a season none of them could have rightfully expected, but the burden is now firmly on Daboll and his 7-3 Giants to prove that they can summon enough resilience and tough-mindedness in the face of their burgeoning adversity to be more than a feel-good story out of nowhere and find a way to a wild-card berth and first postseason appearance since the 2016 season. 

Every game from here on out is a playoff game, and Thanksgiving Day looks like the wrong time and Dallas the wrong place and the 7-3 Cowboys the wrong team and Micah Parsons the wrong game-wrecker to play for a team with one Next Man Up after the next. 

You are what your record says you are most of the time — but we tend to forget that this is Year 1 of a new regime’s rebuilding program. The Giants are 7-3 on merit, yes. But they are a 7-3 team still in need of major personnel upgrades, they are a 7-3 team decimated by injury, they are a 7-3 team without a difference-maker at wide receiver or tight end, they are a 7-3 team with an offensive line in flux. In other words, they are a 7-3 team with absolutely no margin for error. 

Adding injury to injury, now wide receiver Wan’Dale Robinson (torn ACL) is gone got the year and cornerback Adoreé Jackson (MCL) is lost for four to six weeks and of course no one feels bad for the Giants — and shame on them if they feel bad for themselves. 

Alas, Next Man Up is more like Next Secondary Up with the likes of Nick McCloud, Rodarius Williams and rookie Cor’Dale Flott all on call for emergency duty against Dak Prescott and CeeDee Lamb, with Fabian Moreau nursing sore ribs and Xavier McKinney still waiting for his broken fingers to heal. 

The Giants are not built to overcome doing the things that cause you to lose games. If Jones and the Giants do the things that caused them to lose to the Lions, they will lose the two games remaining with the surging Commanders (6-5) and the two games remaining with the Eagles (9-1) and a road game against the Vikings (8-2) and maybe or maybe not the home game against the Jeff Saturday Colts (4-6-1). 

The combined records of their remaining opponents: 40-22-1. 

The let’s-go-1-0-every-week Giants going 0-1 at home against the Lions while the Cowboys were going 1-0 with a 40-3 romp in Minnesota on Sunday is foreboding for Giants fans who have become intoxicated with the sweet smell of success and are greedy for more. 

“I sure do think that what I see out here right now is a team you could go get a Super Bowl with,” Jones says of his Cowboys. 

But this is no time for the Giants to stop believing in a league designed for most everyone to believe. 

Daboll’s great challenge: Find a way to win three games and get to 10. 

Nine may or may not be enough. 

Ten will be. 

After all the misery, all the coaching turmoil, Daniel Jones has never played a playoff game. Barkley has never played a playoff game. Lawrence has never played a playoff game. Andrew Thomas has never played a playoff game. Leonard Williams has never played a playoff game and this is his ninth NFL season, for crying out loud. 

All of them have been the smart, tough and dependable Giants that Daboll and GM Joe Schoen demand. The Giants have fewer of them than the Eagles and Cowboys. Daboll’s work with Daniel Jones has been exemplary. Martindale’s impact on the defense has been profound. The Giants have learned how to win. Or at least how not to lose. 

“You can’t focus on the outside and what people are saying,” Nick Gates said. “Nobody’s given us a chance all year, so it is what it is.” 

Daboll has trained the Giants to flush the previous game win or lose, and the specter of a Cowboys team looking to sweep them makes it that much easier. 

“We can’t let one loss turn into multiple,” Leonard Williams said, “and get away from the process because of one loss. And this is the type of week where we have to put in more mentally knowing that the coaches are gonna take care of our body physically.” 

Daboll and Schoen and his sports science people and esteemed senior vice president of medical services Ronnie Barnes have been aligned from the start. To hell with Woe Is Us. 

“We’re not about excuses — never will be,” Daboll said. “We have people on our roster that are going to be ready to play. And that’s our job as a coaching staff is to get these guys ready to play. Again, you’re always going to hit adversity — whether it’s in a game, whether it’s in a season. We’ve talked about that since April. I don’t think that’s something you all of a sudden talk about. 

“You have to teach it, and you have to try to learn from it. And that’s everybody — it’s myself, it’s the coaches, it’s the players, it’s the support staff. You have to believe in your process. You have to go out there and try to execute the best you can. And if you do those things, you live with the results. And you move on to the next week.” 

He has been a godsend. The right coach at the right time. John Mara can sleep at night again. 

Now let’s see if he has it in him to be the Miracle Man and give Giants fans a Happy Thanksgiving … and beyond.