DETROIT -- There was a time Sunday night when Eli Harold looked around and started to wonder where all this had been. It’s a fair thought, one many inside Ford Field had at varying points. The Detroit Lions, for the better part of six weeks, had looked exactly like the team they had been on the field.

Rough on defense. Struggling on offense. Undisciplined on special teams. Outmatched in a lot of ways. Facing New England figured to be more of the same. And yet, by the fourth quarter during the Lions’ 26-10 win over the Patriots on Sunday night, almost all of those statements had been scrambled.

The offense rediscovered a run game after a half-decade away. Matthew Stafford played his best game of the season, connecting on 60 percent of his passes that went at least 15 yards in the air. The defense found efficiency for the first time under Matt Patricia. And a team that looked like it might have been one of the worst in the NFL now looked like one that could compete.

“Obviously you want to do well all the time, but that’s football," Harold said, while admitting that he, too, wondered where this type of performance was against the Jets and 49ers. "It’s the same as life. You have ups and downs. It’s a roller coaster sometimes.

“Ultimately you want to be that way every time, but I’m like, ‘Man, we had the same players on Monday night. The same players on Sunday.’ I’m like, “Dang, man, we keep playing like this, who knows?’"

And now, after a win over the Patriots -- Patricia’s first as a head coach -- the conversation has turned ever so slightly. No, Sunday night’s win doesn’t erase that the Lions lost by 31 points to the Jets in the season opener or that they trailed by 17 points in the fourth quarter against San Francisco -- two teams that have lost to everybody but the Lions this season.

But it does offer an idea of what Detroit is capable of when it does play well. Sunday night looked more like the team the Lions had hoped -- maybe expected -- to be this season instead of the group they were throughout a rough preseason and an ugly first two weeks.

“Nah, we don’t wonder where it was,” safety Glover Quin said. “We always knew we could play. We just had to get to the point where we knew we could execute and play at a high level for 60 minutes, offensively and defensively.

“We always knew what we were capable of. We just had to go out and do it.”

Things still felt different Sunday night in watching Detroit play. The Lions of old would often have let the Patriots into the game in the second half. Might even have surrendered the lead. Whether they got it back would have been immaterial because Detroit would have eased up, kind of like it has in the past against formidable foes.

Not Sunday night. The Lions kept attacking. Kept pushing the lead to double-digits, even after New England scored its only touchdown to cut Detroit’s lead to the three points. The next drive, the Lions scored a 33-yard touchdown from Stafford to Marvin Jones. Pushed their lead back to 10.

This was a change. This was the unexpected.

According to ESPN Stats & Information, this was the Lions’ 10th-most efficient offensive game since the start of the 2013 season with a rating of 80.50. The Lions had their best rushing performance as a team -- 159 yards -- since Thanksgiving 2013, also the last time Detroit had a 100-yard rusher (Reggie Bush).

Defensively, the Lions held Tom Brady to his fewest passing yards (133) since a 2014 game against Buffalo. For the first time since Brady became New England’s starter, he was unable to pick up a first down for the first 12 minutes of a game.

“We wanted to go out and show everybody what the Detroit Lions really are,” defensive lineman Ricky Jean Francois said. “Not just, ‘OK, they are going to come out here, hold on, and then we are going to lose in the second half.’

“It was all gas. No brakes.”

The Lions needed this. Multiple players said as much -- not only because the team entered Sunday 0-2 but because of the way they had played. They truly believed they were better than the performances they had posted.

Sunday proved that. It was as complete a performance (other than a couple of plays here and there) as Detroit has had in a long time. But in doing so, it left the question of where had these guys been.

And now, can they do it again?

“We just needed to get the negativity off our back. It wasn’t the people,” Jean-Francois said. “It was the negativity and just, ‘We can’t do this. We can’t do that. Matt Patricia’s defense is too complicated. The offense ain’t got an identity.’ Well, I think we answered that today but the thing is, we have to be consistent.

“That’s going to be the biggest thing now. We got over the hump. Now we have to be consistent.”