INDIANAPOLIS -- For much of this season, the New York Giants cruised below the radar in the NFL, allowing their more aptly- and aerodynamically-named Big Apple partners in league membership to court tabloid headlines and monopolize much of the Manhattan playoff talk.

They hovered just tantalizingly close enough in the playoff race to draw a modicum of notice from a few other contenders in the senior conference. For the most part, though, the Giants were viewed as little more than interlopers in the chase for one of six NFC postseason spots.

In essence, New York was a nuisance team, destined to eventually go away.

	Kerry Collins threw for a season-high 366 yards Sunday against the Colts.

After their manhandling of the Indianapolis Colts here on Sunday afternoon, however, the Giants aren't going away but might be making a junket to the playoffs instead. They are within one more, well, Giant step of reaching the top of the beanstalk and of accomplishing a feat that might startle those who haven't paid much attention lately to coach Jim Fassel's team.

And that the Giants control their own destiny following a 44-27 dismantling of the Colts -- New York needs to defeat the visiting Philadelphia Eagles on Saturday to earn a wild-card entry -- is due largely to the efforts of a guy who only a few years ago couldn't be trusted at the controls of any vehicle even on terra firma.

Playing arguably his best game since the club's lopsided win over Minnesota in the 2000 NFC championship game, New York quarterback Kerry Collins turned the Colts secondary into a stable of glue-factory nags, completing 23 of 29 passes for 366 yards, with four touchdown passes and no interceptions. In a contest where Indianapolis could have secured a playoff slot of its own but instead became just part of the AFC morass, the Giants defense abetted Collins' performance by making Peyton Manning look very ordinary indeed.

The New York offense, admittedly, took an early cue from its guys on the other side of the ball.

"The way our defense knocked them around from the beginning of the game, it kind of became contagious, and we wanted to be just as aggressive as they were," said New York wide receiver Amani Toomer, who had 10 catches for 204 yards and three scores. "Coach (Fassel) kept telling us he wasn't going to take his foot off the pedal, and he didn't, not all day. We were attacking them the whole way. As for Kerry, well, what can you say?"

For sure, Collins' performance left some of his teammates speechless, and others searching for an appropriate adjective to describe the carnage that he wrought on the Indianapolis secondary.

Rookie tight end Jeremy Shockey, who hauled in seven passes for 116 yards, repeatedly ran his hand through his unkempt blond mane, stalling for time as he sought the precise phrasing for Collins' tour de force performance.

Shockey worked his way through a mental inventory that featured plenty of un- words until a bystander offered uncanny as a possibility. That brought a nod of affirmation from the Giants' first-round draft pick and Pro Bowl representative.

"Yeah, that's it," acknowledged Shockey, who needs but two catches in the Saturday finale to break Mark Bavaro's franchise single-season record for the most receptions by a tight end. "Whatever that guy said."

Actually one didn't have to dig too deep into the thesaurus to identify the scope of Collins' afternoon. The term "perfect" fit pretty well, given that his statistics ciphered out to a gaudy 158.3 efficiency rating, the highest mark a quarterback can achieve in the NFL's convoluted system.

Fassel noted that he had challenged his team during the week of preparation and that the players responded. None answered the call more splendidly than the oft-maligned Collins, who can be as errant as a scud missile at times, or as on-target as a laser-guided bomb.

On this day, he was the latter, standing tall in the pocket when his protection afforded him time, but also throwing darts off his back foot when the Colts rush drew close to him. He took particular aim on Indianapolis cornerback Walt Harris but also drilled several balls into tight areas in a zone that was supposed to be a "Cover 2" but quickly turned into a "Cover no one."

What made the performance more impressive was that it came against a Colts' defense ranked No. 5 overall and second against the pass.

Collins had four misfires in the opening quarter of the game and then was about as accurate as a guy can get. He put together a consecutive completion streak of 10 at the end of the second quarter and beginning of the third that included several remarkable throws. Only once in the entire outing did he have consecutive incompletions. That came late in the first quarter, Collins missing on three straight passes, one of which was dropped.

Of his 23 completions against an Indianapolis defense he rendered hapless at times, 10 were for 15 yards or more. His touchdown tosses, all occurring in the second half, were for 82, 18, 21 and 27 yards.

The first of them, which came on the opening snap of the third quarter, was a flea-flicker on which Tiki Barber feigned a sweep and then tossed the ball to Collins. The quarterback then found Toomer, in stride behind Colts strong safety David Gibson, with a smart bomb that traveled 57 yards in the air.

	“	The way our defense knocked them around from the beginning of the game, it kind of became contagious, and we wanted to be just as aggressive as they were. Coach (Fassel) kept telling us he wasn't going to take his foot off the pedal, and he didn't, not all day. We were attacking them the whole way. As for Kerry, well, what can you say? ”
		— Amani Toomer, Giants wide receiver

"We just got the Colts into a lot of bad matchups for them," Collins said. "I mean, we had a lot of guys running free, it seemed. Our game plan gave us a lot of things we felt we could do to them and most of it panned out the way it was drawn up. It was just one of those days."

Truth be told, Collins has enjoyed some very good days this season, but they have gone unnoticed in much the same fashion as the Giants were ignored. The eight-year veteran leads the NFC in passing yards, with 3,817, but was not selected for the Pro Bowl game. Neither was Toomer, he now has posted 80 receptions for 1,286 yards and eight touchdowns.

Neither player would allow that the Pro Bowl snub last week played any role in his performance on Sunday afternoon. And, obviously, neither needed any more motivation, given what was on the line.

Said offensive tackle Mike Rosenthal: "Our whole mindset coming into this game was that, if we lost, we were done. So we were going to play this one full throttle until there was nothing left to give."

By virtue of Cincinnati's upset victory over New Orleans -- a game where Fassel was apprised of the score at several junctures of the fourth quarter -- New York suddenly controls its own destiny. Without making too much of it, some veteran players allowed that is apropos, since Collins once had his future in his own hands.

A self-confessed recovering alcoholic, and a quarterback who walked out on the Carolina Panthers in '98 when he claimed his heart was no longer in the game, Collins certainly represents the heart of the New York offense. There are still skeptics who question the sanity of general manager Ernie Accorsi for salvaging Collins from the league scrap heap in 1999 and for rewarding him with a contract extension this summer.

But when Collins plays as he did Sunday, then Accorsi has earned a right to grin, as he did entering a raucous locker room Sunday evening. And when the New York offense explodes, as it did against an Indianapolis defense that has made great strides in the first year of coach Tony Dungy's stewardship, Fassel and his charges have the right to crow a little.

It is an offensive design perceived as too stodgy and predictable, one that featured far too many "bunch" formations early in the campaign, but also has dynamic playmakers in Toomer, Barber and Shockey.

It is also an offense that is more potent since Fassel took over play-calling chores from coordinator Sean Payton nearly two months ago. It's not just a coincidence that the Giants have averaged 34.3 points in the past month, or that the 81 points they have scored their last two outings represent the most in consecutive contests since 1968.

"He's got a great (offensive)," mind Barber said, "and you saw it today. He laid it all out there. If we were going to get beat, and he convinced everyone that we weren't, he wasn't going to leave anything in the play book.

"He gave us a lot to work with, and Kerry took it from there, big-time."

Len Paquarelli is a senior writer for ESPN.com.