Proper NIC Config? Teaming maybe?

Hello All,

I have several W2k3 servers that each have dual onboard Broadcom GigE NICs.
I am building my network in such a way that I don't want the failure of a
piece of network equipment to affect the availability of my network.

I am purchasing two firewalls that support failover, so there will be an
active one and a passive one. I'm putting a 24 port switch behind each
firewall, so that will essentially give me an "A" side and a "B" side.

I was thinking that I'd split the NICs for each server, plugging one into
the A side and B side networks.

My questions:

Would I use NIC teaming for this at the server level? I assume that I would
configure each NIC to be active (as opposed to active/backup)

Is NIC teaming smart enough to always send data out of the same physical NIC
port over which it received the data? (Since the other side of my network
would be dark?)

Do active/passive NIC teams only fail over when a physical NIC fails, or
cane they also detect a network outage on one NIC and then failover? (Or
does this depend on the NIC driver and vendor?)

Or is there another way to do this? I don't really know what this stuff is
called, so I don't know how to Google for it.

Thanks,
Brian