The Eagles did what they had to do in beating the Giants. Don’t read anything else into it.

The Eagles were the right kind of boring Sunday. They came. They saw. They won. They beat the Giants — the Giants’ backups, more accurately — 22-16 at Lincoln Financial Field. They earned a first-round bye and home-field advantage throughout the NFC playoffs. Jalen Hurts started. He did not run much. He threw the football without incident, for the most part. You might have been yawning by halftime. That’s fine. It would have taken something unprecedented or terrible for this to have been a genuinely interesting game, and no one wanted that.

“There were parts of today that weren’t up to our standard,” coach Nick Sirianni said. “But we wanted to set our identity of who we are and just keep plugging away at it. Winning in this league is hard to do, and we won’t apologize for that.”

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There will be a compulsion, among some Eagles fans and observers, to draw some kind of conclusion, grand or small, from this game. They should resist that compulsion. All that mattered for the Eagles was that A) they won, and B) they emerged without Hurts or anyone else suffering a serious injury. You are welcome to complain about Hurts’ end-zone interception in the third quarter or about the two Jack Driscoll penalties that precipitated it or about Jonathan Gannon — because someone has to complain about Jonathan Gannon every week, regardless of how well the Eagles defense played. Just understand that your words are a waste.

At no point Sunday was there ever a sense that the Eagles were in any realistic jeopardy of losing. The Giants, having already assured themselves of the No. 6 seed in the NFC, sat quarterback Daniel Jones, star running back Saquon Barkley, and two of the team’s best defensive linemen: Dexter Lawrence and Leonard Williams. For all the speculation and conjecture about whether their coach, Brian Daboll, would keep his starters in the lineup for the sake of keeping them sharp ahead of the postseason, he did the prudent thing and played it safe.

One might say that, because the game had playoff implications for the Eagles and other teams in the conference, the Giants had a competitive obligation to play Jones, Barkley, and the rest of their starters. One might also say that the Giants, in the strictest definition of the term, “tanked” the game. But only if one were inclined to say such things.

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The Eagles, of course, were more than content to face the Giants’ second-teamers, and they played as if they were exactly that: content. Hurts generated the loudest, longest ovation from the crowd just by jogging out to the field during pregame introductions, and although Giants cornerback Nick McCloud was rightly flagged for a roughing-the-passer penalty in the third quarter, Hurts never went to the ground on the hit. Throughout the game, he was quick to slide to avoid hard contact, and after having him throw on the Eagles’ first six offensive plays, Sirianni and offensive coordinator Shane Steichen took care, through their play-calling, to keep him out of harm’s way.

“He’s savvy about how he goes down,” Sirianni had said Friday. “Sure, he’s competitive, and he’s going to want to go out and do everything he can do. But he also has to understand, regardless of with the shoulder or without the shoulder, that he has to be smart when he takes hits and when he doesn’t take hits. And we have to be smart ourselves as to how we call that as well.”

To their credit, Sirianni and Steichen were good on their word. Hurts didn’t carry the ball on a quarterback sneak until the fourth quarter, and that play was his only designed run. More telling was a sequence early in the second quarter. With the Eagles facing fourth-and-2 from their own 48-yard line, Hurts tried to wave the punting unit off the field in the hopes that they would go for it, as usual. But Sirianni decided to have Brett Kern punt.

It wasn’t worth the risk, not in this game, not against this opponent, not in these circumstances. Two weeks from now, when the Eagles host a divisional-round game, you can bet, if a similar situation arises, that Hurts will again want to go for it. And you can bet that, this time, Sirianni will. Sunday was neither the time nor the place for such boldness, not once the Giants made it clear that the game’s outcome didn’t matter to them at all.

The Eagles have reached the Super Bowl three times. In 1980, they lost three of their final four regular-season games, including one to the Dallas Cowboys, whom they handled three weeks later in the NFC championship game. In 2004, they lost their last two after Andy Reid sat his starters. In 2017, Nick Foles closed the regular season with a pair of performances so ugly that it was fair to wonder whether Doug Pederson might be forced to bench him during the playoffs.

That history is instructive, or should be. The postseason is a new and different beast, and the Eagles will advance or fall independently of what happened here Sunday. There was no momentum for them to gain or lose. There was only the task of beating a team that they probably could have beaten in their sleep. And pretty much did.