Sore but happy, Giants keep season alive

Tom Coughlin didn't even wait for the first question. After a battle against the Jets that left even the Giants' coach limping and maimed, he hobbled onto the podium with as big a grin as he's had in the last two months.

"Never better," he said, anticipating that the first question would be about his injured left leg, Of course, he might have been talking about his team, too.

Coughlin clearly was in pain immediately after the Giants' D.J. Ware ran into his coach after a shove from the Jets' Aaron Maybin during the fourth quarter of the Giants' 29-14 win over the Jets. But the victory had him and his team in good spirits afterward.

The Giants have never been better, at least not this year. They played their best game on defense and provided enough sparks on offense to silence those trash-talking, logo-covering, quarterback-bloodying Jets.

"We knew what we had," linebacker Mathias Kiwanuka said. "We had a fight scheduled for 1 o'clock on Saturday afternoon. And we were going to see who was toughest. You can talk all you want all day long, but after school, when that bell sounds, you have to be ready to fight."

The Giants (8-7) live to fight another day, and their reward for dispatching the Jets is another game against a nemesis. They'll play the Cowboys (8-7) next Sunday in a winner-take-all fight for the NFC East crown. The Giants' victory eliminated the Eagles (7-8), who defeated the Cowboys, 20-7, later Saturday afternoon.

"It started last week," Coughlin said of the do-or-die path that the Giants have been on since last week's loss to the Redskins. "To be honest with you, we need to put this one aside as fast as we can and go to work on Dallas . . . If you would have said at the beginning of the season, with two games to go, we determine our own fate, we would have signed up for it."

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They're down to one. But it wasn't easy. The Giants may have controlled their own destiny, but they weren't really in control of the game through the first half. The Jets scored a touchdown on their first drive -- one that was helped along by the Giants having 12 men on the field as the Jets failed to convert a fourth-and-4 -- and a 29-yard pass from Eli Manning to Victor Cruz gave them a first-and-goal at the 2 before they had to settle for a field goal and a 7-3 deficit early in the second quarter. It wasn't until late in the quarter, on third-and-10 from the 1, that the Giants finally had a spark.

Manning threw a pass to Cruz that would have been good enough for a first down, but he turned it into so much more. He split some poor tackling by Kyle Wilson and Antonio Cromartie -- tackling so bad that it would have made Santonio Holmes cackle, were it not his own team -- and jumped over a diving Eric Smith near midfield as he scored on the longest play in Giants history, including kickoff returns and interceptions. The 99-yard touchdown reception eclipsed the 98-yard pass from Earl Morrall to Homer Jones in 1966.

That play and a missed field goal by the Jets as time expired gave the Giants a 10-7 halftime lead. It wasn't until late in a listless third quarter that the Giants scored again. On three consecutive plays, a 36-yard pass to Cruz brought the Giants to the Jets' 42, a 28-yard run by Brandon Jacobs took them to the 14, and Ahmad Bradshaw ran over safety Brodney Pool on his way to a 14-yard touchdown run.

"I knew that they were going to fold no matter what," Jacobs said. "I knew that they were going to be the ones that cracked. I don't think they have what it took to beat us."

Tynes added a field goal with 13:18 remaining to make it 20-7, and then it was up to the Giants' defense not to crack.

The Jets' offense had the ball for 20 of the next 21 snaps, a stretch that might have been some of the most exciting -- if not pretty -- football the two teams have ever played against each other. The Jets converted another fourth down on a penalty, this time a pass-interference flag against Deon Grant, had an apparent fumble by Mark Sanchez forced by Jason Pierre-Paul overturned by review, had a touchdown called back on offensive pass interference by Plaxico Burress against Prince Amukamara, finally converted a fourth down on their own, and botched a snap from the 1 that the Giants' Jacquian Williams recovered in the end zone for a touchback.

Eli Manning threw on first down after the turnover and gave the ball right back to the Jets on a tipped interception, and even after that, Sanchez had a fumble that was overturned by replay as an incompletion before scrambling for 11- and 1-yard gains on back-to-back plays, the last of which went for a touchdown that made it 20-14.

"I think we had 93 plays on defense and it didn't seem like anybody was tired," Justin Tuck said. "We were all in today."

"We're just excited to be on the field as a defense," Dave Tollefson said of shaking off the questionable challenges and reviews. "It's been a while since we had that excitement around here. We were all playing off each other and any chance we got to be out there to play, it didn't matter the situation. We just wanted to play defense."

The Giants sealed the win with a safety by Chris Canty, who forced Sanchez to throw the ball to D'Brickashaw Ferguson to avoid a sack but did so in the end zone for two points. One play later, after an onside free kick that bounced off the Giants' Henry Hynoski and went out of bounds, Bradshaw scored his second touchdown of the game, scooting between Chris Snee and Bear Pascoe for a 19-yarder.

The Giants were fighting for their playoff lives in this game, and Snee said it felt like a playoff game. But there obviously was more at stake for this team against its crosstown rival. The Giants were able to leave MetLife Stadium with a win, with the curtains pulled back on their Super Bowl logos, and having shut the Jets up.

Could you imagine what it would have been like to walk out of the building had they lost? On Christmas Eve? A season and a holiday ruined in one three-hour span?

"No," Snee said when asked if he could picture it. "And I don't have to."