The standings insist that the Jets are 1-1, that they are two down and 15 to go for this season. The standings lie. The season, their season, whatever this season is going to yield, begins next Sunday, 1 o’clock, MetLife Stadium. Whatever the Jets are, whoever they are, whoever they are going to be, starts then.

The Patriots are on the other sideline next Sunday, and that’s not been a comforting thing for damn near a quarter century for the Jets. Good. Make it that much harder. Make the consequences that much steeper. We still aren’t quite sure who the Jets are, and it’s likely even they don’t know.

By 4 p.m. or so next Sunday, we’ll all know.

Sunday in Dallas? Let’s be honest: even the most fervent Jets acolyte had a hard time picturing anything other than what happened, which was a thorough 30-10 hammering at the hands of a Cowboys team that has now danced its way through the two New York teams by an aggregate 70-10.

Even with Aaron Rodgers, this game was going to be a bear.

Without him … well, there was exactly one moment when the Jets looked like they belonged on the field with the Cowboys. Zach Wilson had just zipped a lovely slant pass to Garrett Wilson and 68 yards later the Jets were within 10-7. Four plays later Dak Prescott threw a ball directly to Sauce Gardner who had nothing but open field in front of him.

Gardner dropped the ball. No pick-six.

No shot. You could almost see Prescott breathe a sigh of relief. What you definitely did see was Prescott fillet the Jets the rest of the way. The only time he wasn’t the best player on the field was when the Dallas defense was on the field, at which point Micah Parsons merely looked like the closest thing to Lawrence Taylor since LT himself.

“We didn’t give our defense a chance to get off the field on third down,” Jets coach Robert Saleh said, “or our offense much of a chance to do much of anything.”

The Cowboys are that good. They have already reduced two opponents to dust. They will do that to others. The Patriots are a pretty good team also; they are not the Cowboys. And the Jets will be at home. It’s tough when you have to call the third week of a season a must-have game, especially against a team with that pedigree, but what can you do? The NFL is a tough room.

“It won’t snowball,” Saleh insisted. “Dallas played a really good game. They played as good as you could.”

He’d better be right. And the Jets had better be right. Again: even with Rodgers, if you’d told the Jets they’d be 1-1 after two weeks, they’d have signed up for it. At around 9 o’clock Monday night, they absolutely would have done that. So the Jets won a game they certainly could have lost and lost a game in which they were in it for about 47 seconds.

Now we see. Now we’ll learn. Zach Wilson had three picks (mostly after the game was out of hand) and was on the run most of the day, but this loss wasn’t on Wilson. That’s the one truly difficult thing the Jets have to come to terms with between now and Sunday.

Their defense is their pride and their signature, and the fuel behind whatever optimism remains even with Rodgers in a cast. Sunday that unit was shredded by Prescott, who kept finding wide-open receivers, and was only sacked once. And the running game — a must-have every week in order to assist Wilson — was invisible. The Jets gained only 64 yards on the ground — 36 by the quarterback.

That simply won’t do.

That won’t do at all.

“It’s tough, man” Wilson said. “I thought I was seeing it well, but we kept getting stopped.”

Said Saleh: “You have to be efficient. You have to stay ahead of the chains.”

They did neither. They paid the price. Now the season starts.

They are 1-1, as it seems most of the league is. The brutal six-game start to the schedule, which was always going to be an impediment, is a third of the way over; now they get the Patriots, an old-school AFL grudge match at an old-school kickoff time, Sunday at 1 p.m. They will walk on the field with everything they hope to achieve still intact.

We’ll see what it looks like when they walk off three hours later.