I'm not totally there yet.

I get nervous with a lot of the reactions here on this board to a wonderful day.

I mean, it was great. A catharsis for long suffering fans. I wasted the whole afternoon/evening glued to ESPN Gamecast and tuning in to the NFL channel for fantastic highlights. Like everyone else here, I felt uplifted and liberated by the team breaking emphatically out of a long tunnel of futility.

But, from everything I can gather, Indy really, honestly is a bad team. Now, it is an NFL team, and on any given Sunday, yadda, yadda, yadda ... Nevertheless, they really did suck. And here's the thing.

The Colts did not exert much pressure on our vulnerable points. DBs on our WRs. Pass rush on our OL and pressuring Goff. Power running game against our D front. Effective passing game on our DBs. These are all question marks for us, and we cannot know how good we have become until we see us encounter stern tests in those areas.

That's why I get nervous by much of the euphoria here. Of course, I get it. We fans have 15 years of frustration breaking free and we WANT SO BADLY to believe that we are seeing the emergence of glory. But I watched GB play SEA and I thought, those teams are grown up programs. I really do not have any strong sense that the elements of our play which looked so great against Indy would hold up anywhere near as well against that sort of team. For example, will our passing game hold its own against SEA's pass rush and DBs? The Indy game does not answer that question.

So, in the short term, I am not there yet. I am not saying the resurgence isn't real. I think SOME of it at least is real. I just can't tell how much.

That includes Goff. I have always liked the guy in general. I have always seen flashes of quality in him. But there are worrying signs, too. I wandered off after PS game 3 because I didn't want to endure the battles over Goff. But here's what I didn't like. He was hot early, and then came the strip-6. OK. But THEN he came out and looked gun-shy in the next short series. They pulled him for the rest of PS, but I keep wondering ... is he more vulnerable than I want to believe? I want to see him compete effectively against serious defensive pressure.

Now. Having said all of that ...

In the long term, I am there. McVay is getting it done. The talent upgrade at WR is authentic. I believe in Wade P far more than I ever believed in the arrogant phony who preceded him. We're getting genuinely better ...

And we're breaking through. The great thing about Sun. was that we EXPLODED into abundant production. That abundance is a real sign of emerging quality and of the thing I am always on about: competitive excellence. You cannot limp into that sort of game dominance, and achieving it breaks through many layers of debilitating malaise. Losing teams must generally pass through layers of ALMOST breaking through before actually doing so. On Sun. we BROKE THROUGH overwhelmingly, and that is a sign of genuine improvement.

Yet I still can't clearly project those positives into competition NOW. I don't think we have any real evidence telling us that we are ready to compete effectively against good teams. There's a lot of reason to hope. But it hasn't been realized yet.

I'm not there. Yet. I believe we'll get there, but I do not know that we are there already.