This one bears repeating

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. —  If everybody from a gem of an NFL December Sunday night simply reconvened four Sundays hence inside Giants Stadium, the nation’s football connoisseurs could just go ahead and swoon.

Bring back the Carolina Panthers, bring back the New York Giants, bring back the wind chill and the overcoats and the reddened faces of coaches John Fox and Tom Coughlin fretting on the sidelines, plus the 78,653 with their baritone pleas for defense and their indiscriminate booing of the home club.

Bring back even the odd trash bag blowing around.

Bring them all back for an NFC championship game that would double as an Act 2 of New York’s first-rate, 34-28 overtime win, the one that clinched No. 1 seeding for the playoffs, established the Meadowlands as the NFC’s gauntlet to the Super Bowl and re-established the Giants as monsters after two dour weeks.

By the time Brandon Jacobs mashed into the end zone from the two-yard line, Coughlin could say, “I think we’ve played ourselves back into playing good football again.”

His 12-3 defending Super Bowl champions’ offense unclogged itself for 301 yards rushing, 215 in just 15 carries from fourth-year back Derrick Ward, who roamed prep fields in Moreno Valley.

Absolutely bring back Mr. Ward, who skittered into the Carolina secondary on runs of 37, 22 and 34 yards during the second half, but rendered those mere warmups for overtime, when he covered 51, 14 and 17 yards on New York’s winning six-play, 87-yard drive that featured zero yards passing.

“The last two weeks we’ve been pretty much disgraceful as far as running the ball,” Ward said, and so the disgrace of 88 yards against Philadelphia and 72 against Dallas subsided as a hot Carolina fell ever so slightly to 11-4.

It did so largely because the very large Jacobs returned from injury to provide the softening -- 24 carries, 87 yards -- while offensive linemen like Rich Seubert on the 51-yard play in overtime provided the necessary ramming of linebackers.

It all “just kind of gave us back that running presence,” quarterback Eli Manning said, and qualified again as “what the New York Giants are all about,” linebacker Antonio Pierce said.

So bring ‘em all back, and let ‘em sort it out with the same competence -- zero turnovers, merely two penalties each -- some of the same types of narrow plot twists.

Those would include John Kasay’s 50-yard field-goal attempt at the end of regulation, which seemed to cut off respiration as it fluttered and “looked like it was going straight down the middle,” Fox said, until it “looked like it faded to the left at the end,” Kasay’s second miss in 26 attempts this year.

They included also that arcane bit of football known as a crucial punt, which happened midway through the fourth quarter when the Giants’ Jeff Feagles landed one at the Carolina five-yard line, and Terrell Thomas batted it out at the one.

That, with Carolina leading, 28-20, prepared the Giants for a tying drive that required only 44 yards, Jacobs pushing in from one yard there, too, with 3:21 left, plus a two-point conversion pass from Manning to Domenik Hixon.

Bring back the drip-drip passing game Manning tries to forge with dinks to tight end Kevin Boss, et al., in the absence of receiver Plaxico Burress. And then, of course, bring back the Panthers offense.

Scalding of late, having drilled four of the previous five opponents for 30-plus points and having won seven of eight, the Panthers scored touchdowns on their first three possessions.

They led, 21-10, in the second quarter as fans booed the home play-calling, and early in the fourth when the Panthers looked bottled up at 21-20, they whisked to the end zone from midfield in two plays, DeAngelo Williams streaming off for a 30-yard touchdown run.

They also reached the Giants’ 27 with just more than a minute left in regulation, until receiver Steve Smith committed one of the world’s more obvious holding penalties and toughened Kasay’s task.

“Disappointing would be putting it mildly,” Carolina quarterback Jake Delhomme said of the whole deal, and added, “The road to the Super Bowl goes through New York. We had a chance. We didn’t get it done.”

If he and his mates and everybody show up far down that road with yet a chance to really get it done, nobody who likes football should complain.

As Boss said around midnight in the Meadowlands, “What a game.”

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Culpepper is a special correspondent.