EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — The New York Giants love playing with a cause, but they'll need to invent a new one now. After the way they steamrollered the Seattle Seahawks Sunday, scoring the first six times they had the ball even without suspended wideout Plaxico Burress, the Giants won't have the No Respect card to play anymore. They look like the best team in the entire NFL right now, not just the rugged NFC East.

Repeat is going to be the buzzword now.

After this 44-6 rout of the Seahawks, the unbeaten Giants are going to have to start swatting away questions about whether they can repeat as Super Bowl champs.

"We all played up to our potential today," defensive end Mathias Kiwanuka said.

Knowing the Giants, maybe they'll be able to work up some useful annoyance about the compliments that are about to come rushing their way now — as in what took everyone so long?

Why not at least consider the idea that last year's roll to their Super Bowl upset of New England was not a fluke after all, but the coming-out party of a very good Giants team that's getting better every week?

"Since winning the championship, they haven't shown any signs of letting up," Seattle linebacker Lofa Tatupu said in the Seahawks' graveyard-quiet locker room.

Tatupu was sitting on a stool, still in full uniform, still covered in dirt and sweat. He shook his head as if he still couldn't quite accept how big the margin of this game had been and added, "Of all the unbeaten teams in the league, they're right at the top. They came out ready to play and left no doubt."

Even if consensus acknowledgement that the Giants are capable of repeating has been slow in coming, the Giants have been admirably grown up about it. They've just gone out and played as if they know how good and deep and versatile they are.

They sneered but mostly shut up when Dallas began the season as the popular pick to win their division and even the Super Bowl, and the Philadelphia Eagles were the second-most-popular choice to win the NFC East instead of them.

Now the Giants are the only unbeaten team left in the division — and, for that matter, the only unbeaten team left in the conference. The Titans are the only other undefeated team in the NFL.

"And I don't think we played our best ball yet, even though today's score might say so," middle linebacker Antonio Pierce insisted.

That's hard to imagine, but what if Pierce is right? The Giants scored all five times they had the ball in the first half, averaged nearly 10 yards a play. They went into halftime with a 27-6 lead and Eli Manning already was 15-for-18 for 224 yards. Brandon Jacobs already had rushed for 78 of his 136 yards. And if Burress is even slightly paranoid, he had to wonder if the Giants weren't sending him a message by how often they fed to the ball to his replacement, Domenik Hixon, in the first half.

"But what I really liked about this game," Pierce said, "was once we got ahead, we never let up."

That will get noted around the league, too. The Giants' 38-point victory was their biggest margin in a regular-season game in 36 years. The last Giants team to start a season 4-0 was the 1990 team that won the Super Bowl.

The NFC East? This Giants' romp came on the same day the Redskins upended Philly, leaving the Eagles at 2-3 just one week after Dallas lost to Washington.

With games against Cleveland and San Francisco up next, the Giants could be 6-0 by the time they roll into Pittsburgh in three weeks to play a Steelers team that matches up poorly against their blitzing defense.

Which is all a long way of saying, "Get ready for the 'can the Giants repeat?"" questions.

"Funny you should say that because, ironically, so far it hasn't really come up," defensive end Renaldo Wynn said Sunday with a laugh. "It's been more about how the Giants haven't been in people's minds as a perennial contender, let alone a team that can repeat. All the hype coming into this year was the Dallas Cowboys are going to be the next big team. Well, why should the Dallas Cowboys be contenders when they haven't proven themselves in the playoffs yet? When Tony Romo has never won a playoff game. You've got to look at that before you crown them."

Former Arizona coach Dennis Green made the same point more colorfully once upon a time. But you get the idea.

"(The Giants) played great ... unbelievable," Seattle quarterback Matt Hasselbeck said. "I looked up at one point, looking at the stats, and I thought, 'That can't be right.' But it was right."

The Giants are stockpiling believers as they go.