Well, after three weeks, the Giants certainly know this:

They know what it looks like to be a genuine Super Bowl contender, a member of the NFL elite. They’ve gotten a good, up-close look at two of the teams that seem almost certain to have a say in who’s going to represent the NFC in the Super Bowl, and they have two dates with the third looming once winter arrives.

The Giants already know about the Cowboys. Eleven days later, they finally seem to have rid themselves of the tire tracks up and down their uniforms that Dallas left behind in that 40-0 annihilation that kicked off the season. The Cowboys backed that up by steamrolling the Jets, too, a week later (though they suffered a brutal setback when star cornerback Trevon Diggs suffered an ACL tear in practice this week).

Now the Giants know all about the 49ers, too. The Niners didn’t roll an army of SUVs over them the way the Cowboys did in the opener, but there was little question about how good they are, and can be, following a deliberate and systematic dismantling of the Giants Thursday night at Levi’s Stadium. The final score was 30-12 and the pathway to get there was a bit more competitive than the massacre two weeks ago.

But if the Giants fancy themselves anything other than bottom-of-the-basket playoff fodder — and they sure seem to believe they can be — they now are as aware as anyone else in football what, exactly, that entails. They’ve seen the Cowboys. They’ve seen the 49ers. They are nowhere near that level now. But there are 15 weeks to try.

Fifteen weeks to prove they belong.

The Giants did what we expect them to do Thursday night. They kept the 49ers’ pinball-machine offense about as well in check as can be reasonably expected; they just couldn’t get off the field on third downs. Their offense was conservative and controlled, understanding that the quickest way to a Dallas redux would be playing loose and sloppy with the ball. But they also never dialed up anything that might’ve truly tested the Niners’ D.

The result was … well, it’s what you would have expected. The Giants aren’t in the 49ers’ class right now. Except for the final 30 minutes last Sunday at Arizona, they haven’t yet been in anyone’s class. Tough start to the schedule. It happens. Now they get as big a rest as you can get without a bye, 11 days off before they host the Seahawks a week from Monday at MetLife. The pathway to the place where the Cowboys and Niners reside begins then.

Time was, these Thursday games were only a feature of Thanksgiving. Time was, Thursday was perceived around the NFL as an important recovery day, and an even more-important practice day, a part of the weekly Sunday-to-Sunday routine. That was then.

Now, Thursdays are a part of every team’s annual journey through the 17-game schedule. They are an annoyance, but they come with the territory. As Giants head coach Brian Daboll said this week: “It’s a quick turnaround, but everybody has to play them.”

It was the 34th time in team history that the Giants were scheduled to play on Thursday night, and while fans of all teams seem to have the belief that the odds are always stacked against them on Thursday nights (even if it’s a rule that someone is almost always going to win and at worst both teams will have to settle for a tie) the Giants may have legitimate reason to dread them.

They are now 16-15-3 in the 34 Thursday games they have played going back to the 1926 season, when on Nov. 11 — the seventh anniversary of the end of World War I, which was the reason for the game, an Armistice Day special paired with a St. John’s Prep-George Washington High School lid-lifter — they beat the Duluth Eskimos in front of a robust crowd of 5,000 paying customers at the Polo Grounds.

In all, the Giants have now played 11 games on Thursday nights since the NFL began to make Thursday night games a more regular part of the annual rotation, and this might be where Giants fans maybe believe that’s poison to their team: they were 4-7 in those games heading into Thursday’s game.

It was the Giants’ previous early-season Thursday game, in 2021, that might’ve been the most harrowing. Up 29-27 with five seconds left, the Giants watched Washington kicker Dustin Hopkins miss a 48-yard field goal; on the play, Dexter Lawrence was called for a highly debatable offside. Given a second life, Hopkins kicked a 43-yarder to win the game.