Counting the postseason, the Giants’ current five-game winning streak is the longest in the NFL. With the way their upcoming schedule plays out, they could easily have a 10-game winning streak by late October.

NFL players and coaches always insist that they take the schedule one game at a time and that they never look beyond the current opponent. But the rest of us are free to look ahead. And looking at the Giants’ schedule for the first two months of the season, it’s clear that the NFL gave Big Blue a very favorable early schedule, one that could easily vault the Giants to a 6 – 0 start.

The Giants already won their first game in convincing fashion against the Washington Redskins, and their second game, Sunday at St. Louis, has all the makings of a blowout. The Rams are coming off a 3 – 13 season, lost their opener 38 – 3 to the Philadelphia Eagles, and generally look like one of the worst teams in the league. The Rams are nine-point underdogs Sunday, making the Giants the heaviest Week 2 favorites in the NFL.

In Week 3 the Giants will host the Cincinnati Bengals. Cincinnati has some big-name players on offense in quarterback Carson Palmer and receivers T.J. Houshmandzadeh and Chad Ocho Cinco, but they had the weakest offensive output of any team in the league in Week 1, gaining just 154 yards in a 17 – 10 loss to the Baltimore Ravens. The Bengals look like a team the Giants should beat easily.

After getting Week 4 off, the Giants will host the Seattle Seahawks, a team that made the playoffs last year and entered this season expecting to make it again. But Seattle looked terrible in losing 34 – 10 to the Buffalo Bills on Sunday, and the loss got worse when the Seahawks learned this week that starting receiver Nate Burleson and starting guard Rob Sims suffered season-ending injuries.

In Week 6 the Giants travel to Cleveland to play the Browns on Monday Night Football. Like Seattle, Cleveland is a team that looked good entering the season but lost badly (28 – 10 at home to the Dallas Cowboys) in Week 1 and has suffered a string of injuries. The Browns were one of the pleasant surprises of 2007 but are early candidates to be one of the disappointments of 2008.

When the Giants host the San Francisco 49ers in Week 7, they should be favored for the sixth consecutive game. The Giants easily beat San Francisco at the Meadowlands last year, and the 49ers were a mess in Week 1, losing 23 – 13 at home to the Arizona Cardinals.

That all means the Giants could very easily be 6 – 0 when they visit Pittsburgh on October 26. Of course, saying the Giants should win their next five games individually isn’t the same as saying they will win all five collectively, and things change quickly enough in the NFL that in six weeks the Giants might look like a very different team than they are now — especially if they suffer any key injuries. But there’s every reason to believe that by late October, the story of the NFL will be that the defending champions are on the road to repeating.

The NFL and the television networks would love that. Last year the New England Patriots moved the TV ratings needle like no other team in the league, but this year, with Tom Brady out for the season, the league needs a new team to serve as the gold standard. The folks in the NFL offices on Park Avenue would love to have the Giants — defending champions in the nation’s biggest television market — playing in high-profile games with playoff implications down the stretch.

Unfortunately for the Giants, after the sixth game of the season, the schedule gets a lot more challenging. The Steelers will be by far the Giants’ toughest test in the first two months of the season. Pittsburgh looked very strong in whipping the Houston Texans in Week 1, and the Giants would probably be underdogs at Heinz Field.

And the Pittsburgh game is just the first of several tough tests during a rough stretch of the season: Following the trip to Pittsburgh is a home game against the Cowboys and a trip to Philadelphia. To the extent that we can project how an NFL season will look through one week, the only opponent the Giants have in the last 10 games of the season that doesn’t currently look like a good bet to be jockeying for a playoff spot is the Redskins in Week 13.

So if the Giants do get off to a 6 – 0 start, no one should think they’re a threat to the 1972 Miami Dolphins’ standing as the only team to record a perfect NFL season. But after the Giants showed last year that the way a season ends is much more important than the way it begins, they’re poised this year to keep alive the momentum from last year’s perfect ending.

Mr. Smith is a writer for Fanhouse.com