After Sunday’s 20-12 win over the Commanders, the Giants — fingers crossed, knock on wood and the folks at 345 Park Avenue will be doing the same — are in the driver’s seat for a playoff spot.

FiveThirtyEight pegs the Giants’ chances of making it at 87 percent with three games to go, and even with three straight losses, they would still be at 54 percent, according to their model’s simulations. It’s possible to clinch a first trip to the playoffs since the ill-fated wild-card game at Lambeau Field all the way back in January 2017 as early as Christmas Eve, with a victory at Minnesota combined with two combined losses by Washington, Seattle and Detroit. That set of results makes it unlikely that the Giants can spend Christmas celebrating, but all the same, it would take a wholesale collapse to miss out now.

And it’s not just the league office that should be happy with the Giants being back in the mix. It’s fans everywhere, or at least fans outside of Philadelphia, Washington and Dallas. One of the stranger occurrences of Big Blue’s fade into irrelevance over the past few seasons has been the morass of 1 p.m. start times suddenly imposed on them. Now, this is the NFL, and people will watch the national games no matter what. It’s not correct, strictly speaking, to call anyone a ratings juggernaut — if the AFC title game were between Jacksonville and Tennessee, probably the two smallest markets in the league, people would devour it all the same.

But the Giants are in that class of teams that’s a little bit different. So are the Cowboys, Packers and 49ers in the NFC, and the Broncos and Steelers in the AFC. If you want to add to the list with the Patriots, Eagles, Commanders, Bears or Dolphins, then be my guest.