Maybe Monday night, and Monday Night Football, the Giants with that kind of stage at home against the Cowboys, the Giants trying to get to 3-0, maybe this will be the night when Daniel Jones looks like a quarterback who can take the Giants back to the Super Bowl someday, and not like a younger version of Ryan Tannehill.

Maybe this can be a night when Jones looks like what the Giants drafted him to be, which means to be one of the better young quarterbacks in the league.

He has not been that yet. You know all the reasons — and excuses — given as to why it hasn’t happened yet. He’s had multiple coaches and multiple coordinators and he doesn’t have enough weapons. Got it. And, of course, there is some truth to that. It doesn’t change the fact Jones has so rarely made you think you were looking at a future star.

Put it this way, and even knowing what a small sample we’re dealing with here now that Jones is being coached up by Brian Daboll: There seems to be a reason why Daboll has been reluctant, even in the two victories his team has managed to grind out, to ask Jones to win the game for him.

Jones has made some plays. He has. He does that sometimes. You still get the idea so far that Daboll has more confidence in Jones’ legs than his right arm.

Jones has had one game in which he has thrown for more than 400 yards. So has Mike White, an emergency starter for the Jets last season against the Bengals. Jones has now started 39 games for the Giants and played 40. He has thrown for more than 300 yards, in a passing league, six times, and has three games in which he has thrown at least three touchdowns. Scott Brunner once had 38 games as the Giants quarterback. Brunner had four games in which he threw for more than 300, and two games in which he had at least three touchdown passes.

According to the Elias Sports Bureau (they know everything), there have been 27 quarterbacks to play 30 or more games since 2019. Here are the ones with the fewest 300-yard games:

Mitchell Trubisky: Two.

Jacoby Brissett: Three.

Lamar Jackson: Four.

Sam Darnold: Five.

Jones and Teddy Bridgewater have six apiece. And Jackson gets a bullet next to his name because he runs for 75 yards a game and is hardly sitting back in the pocket. Everybody else on this list, with the exception of Jackson and Daniel Jones, are glorified backups.

Here is the list of the quarterbacks with the fewest 3-passing-touchdown games over the same period:

Darnold has one. Bridgewater has two. Jones and Brissett and the immortal Andy Dalton have three each. That is where we are in Jones’ fourth season, the one in which he has been asked to perform well enough to keep his job, and show that he has more game and more potential than Dave Brown, another Duke quarterback that the Giants selected with a (supplemental) No. 1 pick.

Everybody knows what Jones did when he introduced himself to Giants fans, coming off the bench for Eli Manning and quarterbacking his team to that great comeback against the Bucs. He had a huge 5-touchdown game against Washington, three days before Christmas in 2019, a game that the Giants finally won in overtime. And he had maybe the best moment of his career so far, last season, against the Saints in New Orleans, when he threw for 402 yards and two touchdowns and brought his team back again, and finally beat the Saints in overtime.

Now Pat Shurmur is gone and Joe Judge is gone and Brian Daboll is here and Saquon Barkley appears to be back. There is real optimism around the Giants, who get the Cowboys at home on Monday night and then get another home game against the Bears before they go to London to play the Packers, for the first time in years. There is a big chance, right in front of them, to start out 4-0 and, who knows, even better than that as they don’t have to face the Packers at Lambeau.

It is why this would be a perfect time for Jones to shine, under the bright lights of Monday night. To light up the Cowboys. To see Jones win the game as if being coached by Daboll just not to lose it. To see him do something that doesn’t have Giants fans still thinking he is their Sam Darnold. The Jets took Darnold with the No. 3 pick in the draft. The Giants took Jones at No. 6. It was Dave Gettleman’s call, and Gettleman no longer works at MetLife Stadium, but no general manager drafts a quarterback that night to be a game manager.

The Bears went big on Trubisky when he was coming out of Chapel Hill the way Brown came out of Durham, and all they got was a game manager who is now on his second team since the Bears, and about to lose his job in Pittsburgh to another ACC hotshot, a kid out of Pittsburgh named Kenny Pickett.

“He’s very steady,” Daboll has said of Jones. “I’m a fairly emotion guy, and it’s a good mix because I can get pretty high strung at time, and he’s very, very consistent.”

And Daboll also says this of his young quarterback:

“I’ve loved him up. What a teacher is supposed to do is teach them. ‘Hey, this is what you did. First of all, tell me why you did it.’ Because it’s a tough position to play. Everybody can see it from the outside, but unless you’re standing back there in the pocket, which I’m not either, you see a lot of different things.”

Here is what we have seen so far from Jones this season. He was 17-for-21 against the Titans, 188 yards, two touchdown passes, one interception. He was 22-for-34 against the Panthers, 176 yards, one touchdown pass, no interceptions. For sure the stat that matters is this one: Two. The Giants have won these two games. Now they have this tremendous chance against the Cowboys, currently quarterbacked by Cooper Rush, to make that start bigger and better against the Cowboys.

The great chance is for the quarterback, to look like one of Those Guys. To not just have a good game, but to show up with his best game on Monday night, and get Giants fans — historically such tough graders on quarterbacks, all the way back to when they liked Scott Brunner better than Phil Simms — to believe that they really have found the next quarterback in the line that had Simms in it, and Eli.

Buck Showalter always says this about ace pitchers in baseball: “You know one when you see one.” Let’s see Daniel Jones look like an ace Monday night.

FEDERER’S FAREWELL TO TENNIS, DON’T FORGET ABOUT PETE & FUN DAY FOR FLACCO …

My son Christopher, a Roger Federer fan from the time he started following tennis, said this the other day about Fed:

That he is one of those athletes who left his sport better than he found it.

That that is exactly what he did.

And I honestly believe that Rafa and Novak Djokovic would not have been as fixed as they were on compiling major titles, as they sure were, would have chased them quite as hard if Fed hadn’t come first.

I’ve covered tennis since I got into this business, and can tell you this:

I wanted that doubles match that he and Rafa played on Friday in London to go all night.

More than any of them, he was the Michael Jordan of his sport.

By the way?

That photograph that Federer posted of him and Rafa and Djokovic and Andy Murray in black tie the other night tried to break the internet.

The only way Greg Norman could have done worse trying to lobby members of Congress about his Blood Money Tour is if he’d slashed the tires of their cars.

How are the Yankees doing with those Next Gen stars Miguel Andujar and Clint Frazier?

Asking for friends who are Yankee fans.

My friend Stanton is hoping that Saquon Barkley can make even half the run at free agency that Aaron Judge is making.

And while Judge keeps hitting home runs, and making his run at Ruth and Roger Maris and a Triple Crown, the kid across town, Pete Alonso, just keeps knocking in runs for the Mets, and continuing to act like their Piazza.

And someone who will end up being the great Met slugger of them all.

With everything that Judge has done for the Yankees, with the way he’s carried them and the way he’s made this baseball September so memorable in New York, it’s worth remembering that the Mets have had a better year.

And have had to go toe-to-toe against the Braves, who are a lot better than anybody chasing the Yankees in the AL East.

I find myself rooting very hard for Tua, and I’m not quite sure why.

Though I will say this isn’t quite the beginning I was hoping for from my BC guy Matt Ryan.

Whatever happens the rest of the way, it was really fun seeing Joe Flacco have one more day for himself like the one he had against the Browns.

Does anybody think that Ime Udoka is still coaching if the charges against him, within the organization, aren’t serious enough to matter the sanctions that the Celtics handed down?

Come on.

Udoka is just one more guy in sports who blew the greatest part he ever had.

By thinking with the wrong part.

I’ll coach the Celtics before he does.

From the reaction, I couldn’t tell whether they put a Yankee game on Apple TV Friday night, or bulldozed Monument Park.

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