It’s one game.
That’s the only thing you can say. That’s the only way you can think. Really, that’s the only thing that will get you through till next Sunday without wanting to put the rest of your season tickets on eBay — or in the fireplace. Say it again. Say it over and over again.
Italicize it — It’s one game.
Boldface it — It’s one game.
Go all caps. Use slammers!!!!
IT’S ONE GAME!!!!!!
“It’s one game,” Giants coach Brian Daboll said. “It wasn’t a good game. I won’t sugarcoat it. We’ve got a lot to learn from, a lot to work on.”
Well. They’d better learn. They’d better work. Because Sunday night the Giants didn’t belong on the same field as the Cowboys. They didn’t belong in the same area code — the Cowboys were 201, the Giants 732. Maybe 305. Yes. That’s Florida. That’s how far removed they seemed from the Cowboys. The final was 40-0. In truth, it could have been anything the infidels from Dallas wanted it to be. It was that bad. It was that brutal.
Remember last year, Week 1? Last year, Week 1, the Giants played a marvelous, masterful game against the Titans, in Nashville. They spotted the AFC’s defending top seed a 13-0 lead. They were getting overwhelmed, both sides of the ball. Daboll cleared his throat at the half. He went for two late, the Giants converted, won, 21-20, and the rest of the season we kept going back to that game.
Kept saying: That’s the one that set the tone.
And forget the fact that this happened to be true, it also runs counter to every bit of day-after logic we hear after the first week of a football season. We even have a name for it: Overreaction Monday. Teams are never as good as they look when they win in Week 1, or as bad as they look when they lose the opener. That’s the narrative, anyway.
Unless — like last year — Week 1 really does set a tone.
Then it’s cited like a law precedent.
So the Giants really need to hope that next week in Phoenix, they honor what their fans are going to be chanting like a mantra — IT’S ONE GAME!!! — for the next six days, maybe make like the lower-case phoenix and rise out of the dust.
Because if this one did set a tone?
Then the season is going to be, well, tone-deaf. Because there wasn’t one thing the Giants did well Sunday. They couldn’t protect Daniel Jones. They couldn’t get to Dak Prescott. They couldn’t hold onto the ball. Their most reliable player a year ago — kicker Graham Gano — had his first kick of the year blocked and returned for a touchdown. He duck-hooked his second, from 36 yards.
More? The Giants had two first-half drives inside the Dallas 15; the Cowboys wound up outscoring them on those two drives, 6-0. More?? The final score meant that in eight straight quarters against their two biggest blood rivals — Eagles in last year’s playoff game, Cowboys on Sunday night — the Giants were outscored 78-7.
Read that one again.
Seventy-eight to seven.
“We got skunked,” Daboll said.
“We have a lot to work on going forward,” Jones said.
It’s one game.
It’s one game.
IT’S ONE GAME!!!!!!
It’s the only way to root. It’s the only way to hope. It’s the only way to believe. You will spend the week — and you should — reminding yourself that the ’07 Giants allowed themselves to get trucked for 80 points in starting that season 0-2. You will spend the week — and you should — recollecting that four years later in Week 1, the Giants were clobbered by a Washington team that finished 5-11. Hell, it may be worth your while to spend the week remembering that the ’86 Giants lost the opener to the Cowboys.
And all of those seasons, you may recall, wound up OK.
The Giants were, in the words of Marsellus Wallace in “Pulp Fiction,” “Pretty bleepin’ far from OK,” Sunday night. If you’ve seen the terrific documentary “BS High” on HBO, what this game actually resembled was the 58-0 hurting that IGA Academy laid on Bishop Sycamore, which served as the impetus for that whole absurdist story to unravel.
Sycamore’s season ended after that one. The Giants will be required to play 16 more. Maybe in a few months — maybe sooner than that — this will all seem funny. For now, there is nothing funny about Cowboys 40, Giants 0. Not even a little bit.
Not even if it’s only one game.
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