ARLINGTON, Texas — This was a taste of just how different this season is likely to be. For close to 15 years, the quarterback and the football team have been almost completely attached at the hip: When Eli Manning played well, it usually followed that it would be a good Monday morning in New York City. When he scuffled, the mood would darken.

As Eli goes, so go the Giants. Not always. Not every week. Mostly.

But in what is almost certainly going to be his final year at the helm of the Giants offense, there are going to be more weeks like this one, weeks where the quarterback’s performance doesn’t jibe with the final score. His receivers are works in progress. Most of the men on his defense aren’t old enough to rent cars on their own yet.

So Manning can have a fine game, as he did Sunday afternoon at AT&T Stadium — 30-for-44, 306 yards (the 53rd time in his career he’s reached the tricentennial), a QB rating of 95.5, one TD, no picks — and it won’t even be close to representing the final score.

That was Cowboys 35, Giants 17, and it wasn’t nearly that close.

“I thought Eli did some really good things,” Giants coach Pat Shurmur said.

“I was pretty happy with the way the offense played,” Manning said.

Manning did do some good things. And there were moments when the offense played well, though as a talking-point going forward, it might look even better if its best player, Saquon Barkley, is allowed to touch the ball more than 15 times per game.

Eli?

You don’t throw for 300 yards by accident, and if there were still times when it seemed he was too quick to check down and dismiss whatever was developing down the field … well, that’s supposed to be a positive for most quarterbacks, isn’t it? Not forcing stuff. Not letting your ego write checks your arm can’t cash.

Of course, in Eli’s case, that is supposed to be a sign of skitterish old age, like a septuagenarian cruising along at 35 in the left lane on the freeway. Here’s a harsh truth about these Giants: Eli isn’t in the top five things that should concern anyone.

That doesn’t mean he still isn’t the lightning rod, though, and so it was again on Sunday, as the Cowboys overcame the early 7-0 lead they spotted the Giants when Manning found Even Engram for a 1-yard TD toss. From there, the Cowboys pulverized the Giants, making enough plays on defense and then looking like they were playing 11-on-6 on offense, it was that easy.

After three quarters, it was 35-10 and both teams had departed the competitive portion of the afternoon, and the 90,353 inside Jerry’s House were worried far more about having a good time than about watching a glorified exhibition. So it was easy to wonder something as the fourth quarter began:

Where’s Daniel Jones?

Jones still had a baseball cap on his head and a clipboard in his hands. He didn’t take any warm-up throws on the bench. It seemed like a perfect opportunity to give the kid a little work before the Cowboys lifted all of their varsity players. But that wasn’t going to happen. As long as it wasn’t garbage time, Jones was keeping his cap on, and Eli was keeping his helmet on.

It wasn’t until the two-minute warning — after Dallas had inserted someone named Cooper Rush to hand the ball off three times, and after the Cowboys had removed any familiar names from their lineup — that Jones came trotting in. He threw four balls. He completed three. He took off for a run, and fumbled, and that was that for the day. No fuss, no muss, no quarterback controversy, but no real experience for No. 8, either.

“That was an obvious situation to play him in,” Shurmur said.

It was predictable, too. After the Geno Smith mess two years ago, the Giants are going to engineer the Manning/Jones dance as closely and carefully as possible. Manning will keep his job — and that means taking every single meaningful snap — until the season is gone, until the year is lost, until the playoffs are a pipe dream. And not a second before.

“I’m the backup quarterback,” Jones said. “That’s my job.”

The other job, the big job, is still Eli Manning’s, and he is still good at it, but he is a veteran quarterback on a team whose bones are still cracking thanks to growing pains.

It’s an odd combination, and one that will yield a lot more games just like this one until the playoffs are gone and the season is exhausted. And not a second before.