EVEN for the Giants, even for the parity-paralyzed NFL, this was amazing. The Giants have been a case study all season long in just how hot and just how cold the football season can be, just how long that season truly is.
Usually, though, the craziness is measured week to week.
This time, it took all of a half hour.
A few minutes before the Giants kicked off against the Cowboys, before they would start applying a gruesome 37-7 beating on their old rivals, it seemed they were destined to play out their 14th game of this season under dreary skies and dreadful conditions. Action taking place in two different stadiums, one 1,300 miles away, one 885 miles away, was conspiring to render the balance of their season utterly useless.
In New Orleans, the Saints had just gone ahead of the hopeless Vikings. In Atlanta, the Falcons had just tied the hapless Seahawks. The Giants were trotting onto the field, the Meadowlands crowd was quietly filing into their seats, and the out-of-town scoreboard was all but bidding farewell to the 2002 season, 14 days ahead of schedule.
It was 4:10 p.m.
By 4:40, everything was different. Everything had changed. Everything. If Wellington Mara himself had been playing with these dominoes, he couldn’t have made them fall into each other more perfectly.
In order:
* Dante Culpepper connected with Randy Moss on a 13-yard touchdown pass with five seconds left in the Superdome. Then, in what must qualify as the brassiest call of the week, the Vikings opted to go for a two-point conversion rather than risk overtime, Culpepper received the snap, dropped it, reached for the ball, dropped it again, picked it up and barreled into the end zone. Vikings 32, Saints 31.
* Tiki Barber scored from one yard out, giving the Giants a quick 7-0 lead.
* The Falcons’ Jay Feely somehow blew a 36-yard field goal in the Georgia Dome, somehow keeping the Seahawks in the game.
* Michael Barrow drilled Dallas quarterback Chad Hutchisons, Kenny Holmes picked it up, showed off a few moves that Walter Payton would have admired, scored. Giants 14, Cowboys 0.
* Back at the Georgia Dome, Shaun Alexander zipped through the Falcons defense for a 27-yard touchdown. Seahawks 30, Falcons 24.
* Back in the Meadowlands, Barber rattled off a 60-yard run, using a few Sweetness moves of his own, setting up Ron Dayne – Ron Dayne! Was this a sign from above, or what? – for a four-yard plunge that made it Giants 21, Cowboys 0, a score that surely must have looked like a typo as it flashed across the rest of the NFL’s scoreboards.
It was 4:39.
And everything was different. Everything had changed. Everything. The two teams the Giants must catch in order to slide into the NFC’s final wild-card berth, the Falcons and Saints, had lost gut-wrenching, nerve-fraying heartbreakers.
The Giants themselves, for the first time all year, were actually allowed to exhale, allowed to breathe, and even if their fun had come at the expense of the Cowboys, who look barely semi-professional, it was still a genuine, honest-to-god laugher, and when was the last one of those that you can remember?
The tightrope ahead of them is still perilously thin, pockmarked with a ridiculous supply of potholes. The Giants still need to sweep their last two games, at Indianapolis and then home to Philadelphia, meaning they still need to beat one team that’s clinched the NFC East and one that remains very much in the hunt for the AFC South.
They also need some help, still.
Just not as much by the close of business yesterday as they needed at the start.
Beyond that, for the first time all year, the Giants seem to be playing with a swagger, carrying genuine momentum. Left for dead two weeks ago, and rightly so, they won what seemed like a for-the-hell-of-it game in Washington last weekend, and just obliterated the Cowboys.
Beyond that, there is something else: a feeling. A sense. An instinct. A queasy feeling in the gizzard. After their lost two-weekend parlay against Houston and Tennessee, the Giants, to a man, said they would try and get to 10-6 on the season, take their chances from there, see how the rest of the NFC shook out once the games started to count for real.
They’re not there yet. But 8-6 is a hell of a lot closer than 6-6. And the playoffs, suddenly, shockingly, almost inexplicably, are now something more than a ridiculous fantasy. Amazing.
