4th time the charm for punter Weatherford?

Steve Weatherford has been to three previous conference championship games, including the last two with the Jets. He has yet to win in any of them, coming oh so close to a Super Bowl trip but being turned away each time. So when the Giants made the playoffs earlier this month, the punter pulled kicker Lawrence Tynes aside and made a bold statement:

"If we're not going to win it all," he said, "I don't even want to go any further. I don't want to play in the playoffs."

Now the Giants have won two postseason games, and a win against the 49ers Sunday would send them to the Super Bowl. The team's record in conference championships has been exactly the opposite of Weatherford's. He is 0-3 and the Giants are 4-0 in this round.

Something's got to give. Weatherford would like it to be his streak, not the team's.

"I've never felt more confident that I'm going to win it all," he said. "Last year, we felt really good, we were playing really good football, but I never really felt like I could feel like I feel right now. I don't feel like we're invincible, but I feel like we're the only people that can stop us. Unless we shoot ourselves in the foot, I don't think there's a team in the NFL that can beat us."

Weatherford said he felt the team he was on that had the best chance to advance to the Super Bowl was the 2006 Saints, who lost to the Bears in his rookie season. He said if they had played them in the Superdome, they probably would have won.

Unlike many of the other Giants who undoubtedly want to get to the Super Bowl just as much, Weatherford is in the odd position of being a punter. He'll be involved in only a handful of plays in this game. Of course, they could be crucial plays. The last time the Giants played the 49ers in the playoffs, they lost on a special-teams blunder. And though a punt hardly ever wins a game, it certainly can lose one.

"Last year it did, to get into the playoffs," Weatherford noted, a reminder of Matt Dodge's ill-advised punt against the Eagles.

"I'm not going to throw four TDs," Weatherford said. "But if I make a mistake, it can make or break the team. I understand that I am not nearly as important to this team as Eli Manning or David Baas or Mario Manningham or Hakeem Nicks. But at the same time, if I didn't show up on Sunday, you guys would notice I wasn't there. I might only have six plays in the game, but I'm going to make them important."

And for the rest of the game?

"All the buildup, all the hopes, all the dreams, and then to have them dashed three times, I mean, I'm not going to let it happen a fourth," Weatherford said. "I'm going to be the biggest cheerleader in the world on Sunday."