Eagles stun Giants to reach NFC Championship Game

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. - The best play in football, Donovan McNabb said yesterday, is the kneel-down.

Most exciting? Well, no.

McNabb is more of a results-oriented guy, though, and it's kinda hard to argue with No. 5 in that context. Especially when the kneel-down sends the Eagles to the NFC Championship Game for the first time in 4 years, out to McNabb's offseason home in Arizona, for a match between the fourth-seeded Cardinals and the sixth-seeded Eagles that will send the winner to Super Bowl XLIII.

Maybe McNabb wanted to call Arizona, to alert a housekeeper to start getting the casa ready, when McNabb was run out of bounds and then decided to pick up the sideline phone at the Giants' bench, incurring a 15-yard penalty with 2 minutes and 59 seconds remaining, the result decided. McNabb said afterward he didn't say anything, to whichever Giants coach presumably was on the other end of the line. There wasn't a lot to say to the Giants, at that point.

Let's go over it again: One win from Super Bowl XLIII. I-I-I. As in, "Ay-yi-yi, can you believe this?"

"Well, we've got another week of work . . . This is something that is storybook," McNabb said, when asked to reflect on the fact that many people felt, less than 2 months ago, that his era of Eagles football was over, along with that of Andy Reid, and older veterans such as Jon Runyan, Tra Thomas and Brian Dawkins.

Of course, getting the Eagles to talk about the Super Bowl this week is going to be about as hard as getting Reid to come up with a descriptive phrase stronger than "heckuva." Their attention will be focused on the Cardinals, who have authored their own improbable postseason run, winning two playoff games in the same year for the first time in franchise history.

Here's a hunch that the citizenry of Eagles Nation won't feel so constrained, after yesterday's shocking, 23-11 NFC divisional-round victory over the host New York Giants, in which the Eagles dominated the second half in ending the reign of the defending Super Bowl champions. The "this is our year" talk, in the wake of the Phils' ending of the city's 25-year championship jinx, is going to dominate discussion.

And who is to say, right now, that it isn't? No team had ever beaten the Giants twice in the same season at Giants Stadium before yesterday, and no NFC sixth seed had ever beaten the top seed, in nine previous such matchups.