Forget the fairy tale, time to find out if the kid can play

THIS part of the story was always lurking, and it was always going to be the most interesting and telling part. This was never a fable. It was never a fairy tale. It was a narrative told in real life, a yarn involving a real person, with real stakes, with a real outcome waiting in the balance.

This is the part where we see if Tommy DeVito really gets the happily ever after.

Brian Daboll said Tuesday morning that he still hadn’t made his mind up who his quarterback will be when the Giants take the field at MetLife Stadium on Sunday for a date with the in-thehunt Rams. It will be the first game the Giants will play this year as a 100 percent officially eliminated football team. On one hand, that matters not a whit to Daboll — “You’re playing pros that are competitive; you try to do everything you can do each week to win,” he said on Tuesday. But again, this is the real world. The Giants are no longer even pretending to play for this season any more. It’s about next year, and years to come. The next two weeks, against LA and the rematch with Philly in the finale, are an open audition. For everyone.

With that in mind, Daboll should once more turn to DeVito, which would be a win-win decision even if the final two weeks go loss-loss for the Giants, which is certainly the way the smart money has those games going. It’s wise for the Giants to try to make as full of an accounting of who DeVito is, and what he can be.

They, along with the rest of the NFL, already know what Tyrod Taylor is at age 34 — a serviceable quarterback who can start for you when necessary and come off the bench for you in a pinch and still has the chops to throw the kind of ball that resulted in that beautiful 69-yard TD toss to Darius Slayton that made the Eagles sweat for a few minutes late in Monday’s 33-25 loss in Philadelphia.

Taylor will have a job next year, here or elsewhere, on merit.

DeVito is still the wild card here, and it’ll serve both the team and the player well to maximize the opportunity that two low-leverage games against teams that will need to be at their best will provide.

In some ways, all of the things that made DeVito such an instant folk hero away from the field — the affinity for chicken cutlets, the regular-Jersey-guy personality, the agent with the funny hat, all of it — did him a disservice. It had the odd countereffect of taking attention away from the fact that in the three-game spurt that started all of this, three wins against Washington, New England and Green Bay, he really was quite terrific. He seemed legit.

It forced a lot of us to ponder this unlikely question:

What if Tommy DeVito isn’t just a good story …

What if he’s a legitimately good quarterback, too?

Two weeks, two losses and one benching later, it seems fair to conclude that he probably wasn’t quite as bulletproof as we wanted to believe during that 3-0 stretch, and probably isn’t quite as hapless as he looked the last two weeks in New Orleans and Philadelphia. He is what he should be: a kid quarterback still finding himself, and trying to craft a place for himself in the league.

A few weeks ago we compared the DeVito phenomenon to Jeremy Lin’s burst upon the scene in 2012, and we can fairly further the analogy now that we’ve seen a few weeks’ worth of humbling. Lin never again played the rest of his career the way he did during the 19 days that comprised Linsanity — but he still had a damn fine career, won a title, banked around $65 million.

You suspect Tommy DeVito would sign up for something like that. And you suspect the Giants wouldn’t mind banking on DeVito to be a ready-to-go backup, at worst, which will be an awfully important gig with the current QB1, Daniel Jones, recovering from knee surgery. The Giants aren’t desperate to make a fast call because it’s their choice to bring him back for $915,000 next year. But the best way to find out if a quarterback can play is to let the quarterback play. Taylor will show them nothing they don’t already know. There’s still plenty to discover about Tommy DeVito. The fun stuff has its place, but that’s over for now. This is the serious side of the coin. This is where we start to find out about that happily ever after.