Coming close just isn't going to cut it anymore

NEW ORLEANS — Hello losing, my old friend, we’ve come to wallow with you again.

Paul Simon never wrote that, and Art Garfunkel certainly never sang that, but they might have collaborated on this if they had been forced to chronicle the Giants the past few years.

The problem with playing every week and losing every week is that it blurs everything together. The bad, the good, the acceptable, the intolerable, the smart, the dumb. No matter how they got there — losing on field goals as time expired the past two games was quite a left-right, gut-punch combination — the Giants are there, sitting at 0-3 for the second time in the past two seasons under head coach Joe Judge.

Daniel Jones is playing winning football, yet he continues to trudge into postgame press conferences looking glum. Secondyear left tackle Andrew Thomas has allayed those summer fears with strong performances, yet the offensive line continues to be an area of turbulence. Rookie Azeez Ojulari looks like a legitimate pass rusher, yet the defense is unreliable.

Judge cannot win, literally, and also figuratively: When he relies on his offense he comes up short, and when he relies on his defense he comes up empty.

Losing paints everything with the same wide brush.

The great expectation is that the Giants will not find their first victory of 2021 on Sunday at New Orleans. It has been 658 days since the Superdome, one of the noisiest and most raucous in the NFL, was inhabited by fans assembled to see their Saints in action, and you can just imagine the ferocity of Who Dat? Nation, together again after the masses were forced to keep out during the global pandemic in 2020 and in the aftermath of this past summer’s Hurricane Ida storm.

“This isn’t like ‘Hoosiers,’ where you’ve got to go down there and measure the court and all that type of stuff,’’ Judge said. “The reality is, though, you’re going to deal with elements outside of the 11 on the field that affect your communication on the field and things you’re going to do. You have to prepare for that.’’

If not for a flag on Dexter Lawrence for nudging offside (by a millisecond) on a last-second field goal in Washington and a dropped interception by Adoree’ Jackson a week later against the Falcons, the Giants could be 2-1 and the atmosphere within and around the franchise would be considerably brighter than the dark and cloudy gloom that has taken hold. “If’’ this and “if not’’ that is a loser’s lament, though, a tired song no one wants to hear.

“I’m not going in there trying to paint any picture of anything that we’re not,’’ Judge said. “We don’t sit in here and say, ‘if this, then that.’ What we look into is just very simply, what do we have to do on the field to correct and how’s that going to give us a greater chance to have success?’’ It is the appropriate question.