New York Giants head coach Tom Coughlin, center, celebrates with players after the NFC Championship Associated Press

As he, his assistant coaches and his players ambled on to the team plane after their victory in the NFC Championship Game on Sunday night, Giants head coach Tom Coughlin beheld a sight that promised a raucous and rowdy flight home.

The flight attendants were effectively Giants cheerleaders, clad in the team's red-and-blue regalia, and they chanted and clapped in rhythm to welcome the players on to the plane. It was the ideal accelerant for a teamwide celebration. For the early part of their six-hour charter from San Francisco to Newark, the Giants reveled in their second Super Bowl berth in four years. They donned baseball caps commemorating their achievement, exchanged high-fives and handshakes, and congratulated each other with the earnestness and enthusiasm of a religious revival.

"The noise level," Coughlin said in a conference call Monday, "was very loud." And it remained so, he added, until at long last, the dead-of-night party calmed, and people started falling asleep.

It is difficult to deny that the Giants earned the right to enjoy themselves. Having found themselves teetering on the edge of postseason elimination after the regular season's first 15 weeks, they have since won five consecutive games to set up in Super Bowl XLVI a rematch with the New England Patriots—a team that the Giants beat both earlier this season and in Super Bowl XLII in 2008.

They have reached this point, Coughlin and some of his players said, in part because they developed a cohesiveness that carried them beyond the mediocrity of their 9-7 regular-season record. An embarrassing loss to the last-place Washington Redskins on Dec. 18 left them 7-7 and facing the prospect that they might miss the playoffs. Yet the Giants dominated their next four opponents—their average margin of victory in each game was 17.8 points—before Lawrence Tynes's 31-yard field goal Sunday sent them to the franchise's fifth Super Bowl.

"Everything changed when we began playing together as a team," defensive lineman Justin Tuck said. "We were a bunch of individuals at one point. It's very different now, and that's part of what you saw [Sunday]. We battled, we stayed together as a team, and we never got down."

The attitude adjustment that Tuck cited was not the only reason for the Giants' turnaround. They got healthier on defense: Linebacker Michael Boley returned to the lineup after missing two games with a hamstring injury, and as the regular season neared its end, Tuck finally recovered fully from a neck injury. But Coughlin said that he could see on Saturday night, as he monitored the team's pregame meetings, how closely the players had bonded and how diligent they were in their work.

"They were locked in as well as any team I've ever been associated with," he said. "You could hear a pin drop in the meeting rooms. You could literally feel and sense the focus and concentration. Those are the things I appreciate it. I understand young people and all those goes with that, but these guys have been able to create a very strong businesslike approach to what they're doing.…It's that type of feeling that has sustained us over the course of the year."

So confident and calm did Coughlin seem about his team Monday that when asked about preparing to play the Patriots, whom the Giants beat 24-20 on Nov. 6, he betrayed little urgency. He was content to relive Sunday night's win. "We'll have time to study," he said.

Coughlin, of course, had been the Giants' wide receivers coach the last time they beat the 49ers to win an NFC title: 1991. That year, the Super Bowl was held in Tampa on Jan. 27—just one week after the conference championship games, rather than the two-week lapse now. After their 15-13 victory, the Giants flew directly from San Francisco to Tampa. Like the rest of the coaches on Bill Parcells's staff, Coughlin dragged himself into the team hotel sometime after 4 a.m., then was up less than four hours later for an 8 a.m. meeting to devise the Giants' game plan against the Buffalo Bills. If there were cheerleading attendants on that flight, he said, he doesn't remember them.

—Aditi Kinkhabwala contributed to this article.