Tom Rock: Odell Beckham Jr., Giants vs. Cowboys and waiting all day for Sunday night

Odell Beckham Jr. Against the Cowboys. At MetLife Stadium. On Sunday Night Football.

No, you were not the only one who had flashbacks to Nov. 23, 2014, when ol’ number 13 took the field for the Giants in Week 1 on Sunday night. The guy calling the action did too.

Cris Collinsworth, who was the TV analyst for the game more than a decade ago when Beckham made that signature one-handed catch against Dallas, was back in the booth for this one on NBC. He had a different play-by-play partner — Mike Tirico instead of Al Michaels — but Collinsworth said seeing Beckham in eerily similar circumstances more than a decade after he was a rookie would be special.

“The first thing I’ll do when I see him warming up,” Collinsworth said on an NBC conference call last week, “is I’ll look down in that left end zone and enjoy a moment.”

Beckham isn’t the same player now. He hasn’t even taken an NFL snap since his brief stint with the Dolphins ended in December 2024. His role on this team is less about being a star and more about being a supporting actor. But he still carries the same magical aura he always had, the potential for greatness and for something unique to occur any time he is on the field.

In warm-ups, he delivered his signature style. While all eyes were on Malik Nabers to decipher whether he would be active, Beckham made a fantastic one-handed catch on a pass from Jaxson Dart that drew a gasp from the crowd and cheers from his teammates.

And yes, he even has dyed his hair back to the bleachy platinum blond color it was in 2014. You wouldn’t expect Batman to show up without his cowl, would you?

“I got a request from a couple of young guys,” Beckham said. “It was, ‘We need to see the blond, I need that.’ It was just like a core memory for them.”

It’s not as long as it was then, and it fittingly looks almost like a gray mane rather than a flashy ’do, but it’s just another way for him to remind folks of who he was, who he is and who he still might be able to be.

Collinsworth recalled the play and how “every replay, something new got revealed as to the greatness of that catch.”

First, it was whether he caught it. Then it was whether he was fouled (he was) and whether he went out of bounds (he did not). Then the super-slow-motion shots showed that he made the catch with only three fingers on the football.

It was a rare where-were-you moment for many in the NFL, a play people recall seeing live on television and watching over and over again for the past 12 years.

And if you were lucky enough to have been in the building (we’ll raise our hand for this), you undoubtedly cling to the wave of silent disbelief that swept through the crowd before replays on the big board confirmed what the eyes had just seen but could not fully comprehend.

Current Giants offensive coordinator Matt Nagy was the quarterbacks coach for Kansas City and was watching at home that night. He noted that his sons, including Tate, who is a sophomore receiver for Kansas, started practicing one-handed catches because of it.

“I coached Odell when we were in the Pro Bowl [after the 2015 season] and I got to see him in his prime then and I had a ton of respect for him,” Nagy said. “To see him now and where he is at in this part of his career, you really start to appreciate where you are at. Now it’s the team part, and he has embraced that.”

Beckham’s catch helped create another Giants receiver.

“I wasn’t really a football fan when I was growing up,” Malik Nabers said. “He kind of was the first person that literally made me start watching football, just the dances, the one-handers. He was the main person. Him being here right now, in the same room as me, it’s surreal. Sometimes I’ve got to take a moment.”

Collinsworth said he has had several conversations with Beckham since that iconic grab. He also was NBC’s game analyst for Super Bowl LVI, when Beckham was on the Rams and suffered an ACL tear but won a ring. Now he had the opportunity to call this one and whatever happened in it.

But they’ll forever be linked by that night in 2014, when Collinsworth’s shock spoke for all of us (“Did he catch that? Oh my goodness, oh my goodness!” he said on the air) and he immediately stamped the play as “sick,” “absolutely impossible” and “maybe the greatest catch I’ve ever seen.”

“It’s kind of a wonderful little shared common bond that we have,” Collinsworth said last week. “I try hard to not cheer, but I have to admit I was pretty pumped when I heard the news that he made the team and that he was wearing 13 again.”

On Sunday, when Beckham returned to the scene of his greatest play — perhaps the greatest play in the history of the stadium and the Sunday Night Football franchise — there was no encore. He played sparingly and didn’t even catch a pass through the first three quarters.

It didn’t matter. He was a big part of the vibes.

That part will never change.