Jets-Patriots of recent years offered all the thrill-a-minute appeal of passing a kidney stone.

 

The Patriots either stomped on their second-rate division rivals, or the two teams sloughed their way through muddy, low-scoring battles that displayed all the offensive fireworks of a Chicago Bears vs. Detroit Spartans battle circa 1931. (A 2006 Jets-Patriots battle at Gillette was so boring and muddy that the Patriots literally tore up their grass and replaced it with FieldTurf, almost overnight.)

 

Thursday night was quite a different story.

 

The J-Men captured a 34-31 overtime victory over their nemesis, in the highest scoring game in the series in 21 years. They also secured first place in the tough AFC East and, barring a Kotite-esque collapse, New York is on the fast track to the division title and the franchise's best season in 10 years.

Here are our deepest thoughts, sung to the tune of Harry Belafonte's Banana Boat Song.

 

Wow! Like a quasar on the brink of imploding, Brett Favre shined so brightly and came up so big Thursday night we had him confused with Joe Montana or an actual really efficient quarterback instead of well … Brett Favre.

 

He went his second straight game without throwing an interception since the middle of last season – following a period in which he had thrown 20 in 15 games. He also produced one of the most accurate outings of his career, completing 26 of 33 passes (78.8) – his best day in more than four years, since a 23 of 29 effort (79.3%) in a 41-20 win over Dallas in 2004.

 

More importantly, he was so clutch you could have used him to downshift a runaway 18-wheeler – or an NFL team – careening down the side of a Utah mountain and into the abyss of defeat.

 

In overtime, he never gave the Patriots a shot at victory, reeling off 13 plays in a game-winning drive that took more than half of the overtime period off the clock. The key play? Backed up at his own 15 and facing a 3rd and 15, Favre completed a 16-yard pass to Dustin Keller that essentially saved the day for a Jets team that was playing with a defense that fell apart in the second half. That’s clutch.

 

Out of the eternal emptiness of clipboard-holding, second-string quarterbacking, Patriots quarterback Matt Cassel did just about everything right but win the overtime coin toss Thursday night.

 

He engineered long scoring drives in the final seconds of each half to lead the Patriots back from a 24-6 deficit. Along the way, he only became the first player in NFL history to pass for 400 yards in a game (400 even) and rush for more than 50 yards (62). (Reports conflict over whether he's the first in history or the first since the merger ... we're trying to get to the bottom of it.)

 

The game-tying drive at the end of regulation was a real beauty that looked as if it had been engineered by Joe Montana or Tom Brady themselves.

 

Cassel drove the Patriots 62 yards in 64 seconds with no timeouts, before throwing an absolute laser to a diving Randy Moss for the game-tying score with 1 second left.

 

It was a world-class game by a QB who will, in all likelihood, make big money somewhere next year other than New England.

 

Welcome to the big time, Cassel ... you've come a long way since that day against Palisades nine years ago.

 

Are we the only ones who start singing this song every time Mayo, New England’s hard hitting rookie linebacker, makes a tackle?

 

 

 

(Yeah, that’s right, you'll have that song stuck in your head all day ... in fact, we had half the gang at the Caddy club humming along by the fourth quarter.)

 

Mayo seemed to make every other tackle for the Patriots defense, while nearly decapitating a handful of Jets with big, picture-perfect hits in which he drove right through the ball carrier so convincingly that Vince Lombardi himself jumped up to pat him on the back.

 

Mayo set game and personal highs with 20 tackles (16 solo, 4 assists), a big night by any measure, and helped secure his lead position in the race for defensive rookie of the year honors.

 

(For those of you keeping score at home, Mayo didn't make half of New England's tackles, it only felt that way. It was just over a quarter, with 20 tackles on 75 Jets snaps.)

 

Keller, the Jets rookie tight end out of Purdue, is quickly emerging as Favre’s go-to guy and has the potential to become a premier tight end. He had his first 100-yard game (6 receptions for 107) last week against St. Louis, and this week set a personal best for receptions with 8, while tacking on another 87 yards – those are all big numbers for a tight end.

 

He had caught 13 passes for 147 yards in New York’s first eight games, and has now added 14 catches for 194 yards in his last two.

 

Bitching about the NFL’s lame overtime system is a popular pastime any time a team loses in the extra period without touching the ball. And you can be sure Patriots fans are bitching so loudly today that they sound like cackling old whores.

 

But the team that wins the toss does not have the advantage many think. According to official NFL statistics, the team that has won the OT toss has won just 53.2 percent the time (222 victories in 417 OT games from 1974 to 2007).

 

See, the thing about overtime is that, even though the team that won the toss gets to play offense, the team that lost the toss gets to play defense. So it helps if you actually make a stop or two.

 

Cassel’s 462 yards of offense is more than Tom Brady ever produced in a single game.

 

In fact, Brady has had just one 400-yard passing game in his Hall of Fame career, throwing for 410 against the Chiefs back in 2002. Brady added a nimble 2 yards on the ground that day.

 

So that makes the score Cassel 462, Brady 412.

 

Want to quantify the Brett Favre Effect? Here it is:

That’s an improvement of 72 percent for those of you keeping score at home. And it's historic by team standards. The normally offensively challenged J-Men have ranked in the top three in scoring just twice since a guy named Namath last passed the pigskin, most recently in 1982.

 

There’s a massive showdown that’s just shaped up next Sunday: the surging Jets travel to Nashville in an effort to  topple the undefeated Titans and grab a first-round bye.

 

If the Favre Gang gets past that game, the schedule is extraordinarily favorable: home against the Broncos, Bills and Dolphins, and at San Francisco and Seattle. The Jets will probably be favorites in each of their final five games.

 

Sounds like a team that just won the division Thursday night.

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