Mike Celizic

This was no ordinary second-game-of-the-season victory the Giants conjured up against Philadelphia on Sunday. It was the kind of victory that we may look back on as the game that launched a team’s season and a player’s legend, a victory that years hence fans of both teams will still talk about.

Leave it to a wide receiver who sports diamond earrings big enough to have “Titleist” written on them to put things into historical perspective. That would be Plaxico Burress, who out-leaped a badly overmatched Eagle defensive back to haul in the 31-yard touchdown pass that won the game in overtime.

The question was whether the game marked Eli Manning’s coming of age in the NFL, and Burress answered it by talking about how much better Manning gets every week and how hard he works at his craft. Finally, he said that if Manning continues to grow as he has, “20 or 30 years later people are still going to be talking about how great we were.”

It’s a little early for that, but after Sunday, it’s hard to deny that Burress’ scenario is a definite possibility.

At the very least, after Sunday's performance at Lincoln Financial Field, there should be no more speculation on whether Eli Manning is going to be a big-time quarterback who can rise to the occasion. He settled that debate with the way he and his team came back from a miserable first half and tepid third quarter to score 17 unanswered points in the fourth quarter to tie the game and six more in overtime to win it.

The Giants had taken the opening kickoff, drove the length of the field, and scored on a 37-yard touchdown pass from Manning to Amani Toomer. The Eagles answered with a 92-yard drive of their own to tie the score. And then, while the Eagles scored 10 more points in the first half, the Giants disintegrated.

Offensively, they could do nothing as the Eagles stuffed their running game and launched a ferocious pass rush that planted Manning into the turf five times in the first half and held him to seven completions on 11 attempts for 65 net yards.

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Defensively, the Giants also had issues. It wasn’t that there were holes in their pass defense. It was more like yawning chasms and utter voids. Tight end L.J. Smith kept showing up in the middle of the field without anyone within ten yards of him, leaving one to wonder if he had stolen Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility and was whipping it off just in time for McNabb to hit him. Wide receiver Donte Stallworth was left similarly open, once for a 20-yard touchdown reception.

When the Eagles opened the second half by again driving the length of the field with no discernible opposition from the Giants to make it a 24-7 game, it looked as if the Giants were going to start the season in a 0-2 hole and the Eagles were going to take an early stranglehold on the NFC East, in the process declaring to the world that 2005 was a bad dream and the team that went to four straight NFC Championship games and a Super Bowl was back.

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To say there was great joy in the Linc was a gross understatement. The victory party started in the third quarter as fans high-fived each other, reveling in the whupping being put on their hated rivals from Exit 16W on the Jersey Pike. Donovan McNabb, who had 256 passing yards in the first half alone was laughing. The Eagles were feeling smug as they settled back to coast to an easy win.

It’s rare to see any NFL team blow a 17-point fourth-quarter lead, and rarer still to see a team as good as Philadelphia do it. But when a team comes back from that kind of deficit, it’s usually one that had been playing well but was victimized by bad bounces and big plays.

That wasn’t the case for the Giants. They weren’t playing well. They were hardly playing at all. The Eagles built their lead without the benefit of a turnover or major blunder by the Giants. They simply hammered New York into submission.

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