Can't wait: Burress' Jets debut has been a long time coming

FLORHAM PARK, N.J. -- Elijah Burress wakes up every morning, finds his football-playing father and asks him the same question.

"He wants to know, 'Is it Sunday yet?' " Plaxico Burress said smiling, thinking of his excited 4-year-old son.

"No," Burress tells him. "Today is just Thursday."

The New York Jets wide receiver has mastered being patient, especially since he has waited for this moment for a few years. He will step on a football field for a regular-season game for the first time in nearly three years when the Jets take on the Dallas Cowboys on Sunday night, the 10-year anniversary of the terrorist attacks.

"I know that my emotions will be high come Sunday," Burress said.

His journey has taken him from the top of the game as a Super Bowl star with the Giants to a 20-month prison sentence after he accidentally shot himself in a Manhattan nightclub. The Jets gave him a second chance at his NFL career in July, and he insists he'll make the most of it and return as one of the league's top wide receivers.

The long wait finally will come to an end when he walks through the tunnel at MetLife Stadium a few minutes before the season opener and looks up into the crowd and finds his family.

"My son is through the roof right now," Burress said. "He's running around in his Jets hat, his Jets jersey. When I come home, he has a mouthpiece in, running up and down the hallway. I mean, he's fired up. He's ready to go."

And so is Burress. There have been lots of questions since he got out of prison if when he returned, he would be the same player he once was. He dealt with a sprained ankle early in training camp, but he recovered in time to have a terrific performance in a preseason game in which he caught three passes, including a pretty over-the-shoulder touchdown reception.

That was just the dress rehearsal, though. The real thing starts Sunday night. Burress said his ankle is "fine, man," and his emotions are in check. For now.

"Tomorrow is Friday, the last preparation day physically for myself and for everybody else to go out and be as sharp as we can and just understanding the calls," he said. "Getting to the line of scrimmage where you don't have to think, just go out and play. I'm getting to that point as far as learning the offense where I can just go out and play without thinking and just kind of let your natural ability take over. I feel it as each day goes by that it's slowly coming upon me, and I'm excited along with everybody else."

While he always told himself this day would come, back when he was mopping floors and cleaning toilets in prison, Burress knew he had a lot of work to do before he even made it here.

"I thought that I would have another chance to come back and play, but going through everything that I was going through mentally at that time, I wasn't focused on football," he said. "It was more about life and getting onto my family and those kinds of things. And then when I came home and I was able to spend some time with the family, I started concentrating more on getting myself back into pretty good physical shape."

He has quickly become one of the guys, fitting in seamlessly with the other receivers such as Santonio Holmes and Derrick Mason and spending plenty of time chatting about the offense with quarterback Mark Sanchez.

"It's been great," Jets offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer said of working with Burress. "I love working with him, the way he talks about the game and the way he thinks about the game."

Schottenheimer's game plan for Burress, at least at first, will be leaving him in the spot on the field he's most comfortable with -- the 'X' position -- but could move him from one side of the field to the other depending on the defenses.

"I think there will come a time, maybe within the next few weeks, to where we can just call plays and just throw anybody at any position, and you can go out and play fast without thinking," Burress said. "But there's a lot of verbiage in this offense to where you really have to hang in the huddle, sit to really listen to the call or you can mess the whole play up with just missing one word."

Burress will just be patient, soak in the offense and do whatever he can to help the Jets try to win. And, he'll try to keep little Elijah from bouncing off the walls until Sunday.

"He understands everything," Burress said. "Daddy is coming back to playing football. Santonio is his next favorite player, other than me. So he wants to know who throws the better ball, Sanchez or Eli (Manning)? So I've got to go through that everyday with him."

So, Plax? What do you tell him? Sanchez or Manning?

"It's all good man," Burress said, laughing off the question. "We just have fun. Like I said, I'm excited for him."

Notes:Jets LB Bart Scott said Giants Stadium "was a lot louder" than MetLife Stadium was last season, when the team went 4-4 at home. "I think maybe the die-hard fans can't afford tickets anymore," Scott said. "I think we have to challenge the people in the stadium now to get out of their iPads and tweets and represent the stadium. Get loud."

Copyright 2011 by The Associated Press