The game had been over for just a few moments, and the players were still struggling out of their shoulder pads when the murmuring finally reached full pitch. For weeks, the Green Bay Packers had existed in a blissful bubble, insulated by their good nature and their distant locale from the ceaseless questions, the ballooning expectations and the mounting fatigue of a chase for football’s most elusive goal. They have been dominant this season but not domineering, oddly under the radar for a defending champion on the path to something even greater.

But after the Packers’ victory over the Giants last Sunday, there was no avoiding the target that has bedeviled two other teams in the last five years and that now awaits the Packers in the final month of the regular season. As Coach Mike McCarthy and quarterback Aaron Rodgers quickly moved to head off the looming story line — “I’m not going to talk about 16-0 or anything,” Rodgers said unbidden after the Giants game — Rodney Harrison watched from a New York television studio, letting his mind wander back to 2007, often marveling at the differences that may favor the Packers’ chances of completing what the New England Patriots could not.

“Because of Spygate, everyone hated the Patriots,” Harrison, now an analyst for NBC’s “Football Night in America,” said in an interview. “We were like the villains. Everyone wanted us to lose. The Packers, on the other hand, are a fairy-tale story. They’re a bunch of good guys, we want them to win, it doesn’t bother us as much. We had even more intense pressure because everybody hated us. Anytime you’re the first team to do something, you carry all that pressure. The Packers, even if they do it, they’re the second team to ever go 16-0. There’s no pressure on them because we already attained that goal.”

Maybe so. At 12-0, already the N.F.C. North champions and with a quarterback who is having an extraordinary season, the Packers have the same luster that burnished the Patriots in 2007 and the Indianapolis Colts in 2009 when they pursued undefeated seasons.