Mike Celizic

You can believe Bill Belichick when he says that he’s approaching this Sunday’s game with the Jets the same way he approaches every game. Just don’t believe his players when they say the same thing or the Jets when they say they don’t know what Spygate is.

You know the players are lying like Barry Bonds in front of that grand jury, because if they’re telling the truth, they’re not worthy of being called competitors, and Jets-Patriots isn’t worth paying attention to.

Let the coaches talk all they want about this being another game. For Belichick, it is because he knows only one way to prepare, and it’s the same way a lion plans a hunting trip — mercy doesn’t enter the equation.

He takes no team lightly, and the goal is always to win by as many points as possible. Whether that’s one point or 51 doesn’t matter. Like the lion’s prey, dead is dead.

Eric Mangini is probably a different animal — in this case he’s playing the role of the impala with a broken leg. He’s got reason to crank up his efforts for this one. Belichick has barely spoken to him since he left the Patriots’ staff to take over the Jets and beating his former teacher would give him something to take out of an otherwise miserable season.

And we like that, too. Who knows, Mangini could make this a game — for a quarter or two.

But what we really want is the Patriots to play for the honor of their coach, whether he has any or not, their franchise and themselves. And I don’t think we have to worry about them showing up. You saw what they did to the Steelers when Anthony Smith guaranteed victory against them. The Patriots said nothing all week and then undressed Smith on the field.

And that’s what they’re going to do on Sunday. They know very well what Mangini did in the first game of the season when he turned the Pats in for filming his defensive signals on the sideline. And you know they’re ticked off about it, because my guess is that everybody cheats any way they can, and for Mangini to turn in his former boss isn’t playing fair.

Mangini broke one of the unwritten rules of the game. He may have been right in his accusation, but in the ethos of the game, he’s a rat. Now he’s going to have to pay.

Look, we all know — and I’m including the Jets in that “we” — that New England is going to go through the Jets like a storm surge through a sand castle. And it won’t be just because the Patriots are the vastly superior team.

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If this were just another mismatch, it wouldn’t be worth watching, not even with the Patriots going for their fourteenth straight victory on the season. You’d switch over now and then to check the score, but you wouldn’t sit riveted to it.

But this isn’t about the Patriots beating another of the NFL’s bottom feeders. This is about revenge.

I know it’s terrible, but it’s also delicious. There isn’t enough honest gut-level enmity in sports these days. Players roam from team to team as free agents, they share the same agents and clothing sponsors and go to the same golf outings and charity events in the off-season. They hug before the games and after them and help each other up off the turf during the action. Sometimes, there’s so much bonhomie and fellowship it makes you want to throw up.

So when you get some genuine bad blood, you embrace it. It’s what used to make sports so much fun back in the dark ages, when teams like baseball’s Giants and Dodgers hated each other as thoroughly as their fans did. You don’t want Juan Marichal whacking Johnny Roseboro over the head with a bat, but you want that element of danger. It’s the NASCAR syndrome — you’re not watching just to see the crashes, but if there were no danger of disaster, the game would lose a lot of its appeal.

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Consider this a detour back to those days, a game in which it is just possible, no matter how remotely, that raw emotion will carry the Jets to a stunning upset, a game in which it is possible, and not remotely at all, that the Patriots will embark on an orgy of offense and defense that would impress even their famously unimpressionable coach.

We don’t care what they say before the game. In fact, the more they deny that Spygate is a factor, the more we know they’re thinking about it. We just want them to go out there and write yet another chapter in the Patriots’ amazing season. Maybe one we’ll remember for a long time to come.

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