01/16 — When a quarterback gets on a roll, it can be mind-numbingly beautiful if he's throwing bull's-eyes for your team and mind-blowingly frustrating if he's on the bad guys' side.

That's what I was thinking during Tom Brady's Saturday night fever as he pitched one strike after another. His passes were mostly short but highly effective and well-distributed as the Patriots moved the ball at will for most of the game in their 31-20 AFC Divisional Round triumph over Jacksonville.

Another thought was that this was déjà vu all over again for me. Brady's final line — 26-for-28 for a 92.9 percent completion rate that set the NFL's record for greatest accuracy in any game, playoffs or regular season — clinched it, since the playoff record he broke was Phil Simms' 88.0 percent 22-for-25 in the Giants' Super Bowl XXV win over Denver 20 postseasons ago.

I was in the Rose Bowl stands for that performance. As the editor of an independent Giants team paper, I got to sit in the auxiliary press area, actually just some rows of the cavernous stadium cordoned off from the 100,000 fans for the overflow media crowd. I sat next to Lynn Swann — yes, the Lynn Swann, just starting out on his broadcasting career and one of a cast of seemingly thousands that ABC had brought to the game.

It's on my own mental iPod, the memories of sharing some comments with Swannie that day as images of some of his memorable Super Bowl catches flashed by on the Rose Bowl videoboards, then returning to enjoying the rest of Simms' masterful slinging against the helpless Broncos.

It's the best passing performance I've ever seen in person, and it was the best I'd ever observed until Brady.

A subplot to TB's night was how he started against the Jaguars, completing his first 16 into the third quarter, for 147 yards and a touchdown.

As Jets observers, we've seen a few hot hands just like that in recent seasons. There was Glenn Foley going 14-for-14 in relief of Neil O'Donnell in 1997 against the Patriots, then Vinny Testaverde hitting 13 straight in the 1998 AFC Championship Game at Denver.

Chad Pennington has had a few streaks like that as well, most recently this season. In fact, his streak at Buffalo in Game 4 — 15-for-15, 162 yards, one TD — was very similar to Brady's vs. Jacksonville. Except that Chad's game didn't end quite as successfully.

Here are the eight 10-in-a-row passing streaks by Jets QBs since 2000, all interestingly occurring on the road (*playoff game):

And here are the six 10-for-10's or better by Jets opponents since 2000: