The toe tag was being prepared early in the night, but the Yankees are not dead yet.

With his hometown team facing a 3-0 deficit in the World Series and trailing by a run in the third inning of Game 4, Anthony Volpe played the role of human defibrillator, crushing a grand slam that put the Yankees ahead.

The bullpen then held on for dear life before the Yankees finally broke the game open late to pull out an 11-4 win over the Dodgers on Tuesday night in The Bronx.

“Hopefully when we win the World Series and I’m with family, we can all reflect on everything,” Volpe said. “It was just a big game. We just wanted to go 1-0 today and win today and see where it took us.”

No team has ever come back from a 3-0 deficit in the World Series, and the Yankees still have an uphill climb to become the first.

But they took the first step Tuesday, at the least saving themselves the embarrassment of getting swept, and set up Game 5 on Wednesday back at Yankee Stadium with their ace on the mound.

“Just winning one sets it up,” Anthony Rizzo said before the game. “We’ve got Gerrit Cole lurking [Wednesday], if we can get there. We’ve got a pissed off [Carlos] Rodon for Game 6, if we can get out there [to Los Angeles]. And Game 7 is always a crapshoot.”

Volpe’s grand slam, which sent a nervous sellout crowd of 49,354 into a frenzy, gave the Yankees a 5-2 lead — their first since the 10th inning of Game 1.

The Dodgers pulled within 5-4 with two runs off Luis Gil in the fifth inning, but that was as close as they got.

Tim Hill, Clay Holmes, Mark Leiter Jr., Luke Weaver and Tim Mayza combined for five scoreless innings while Austin Wells crushed a solo homer in the sixth and Gleyber Torres ripped a three-run shot in a five-run eighth inning that turned a nail-biter into a blowout.

The Yankees’ big eighth inning — which allowed Aaron Boone to not use Weaver in the ninth for a seven-out save, therefore keeping him in play for Game 5 — was capped off by a scuffling Aaron Judge getting in on the fun with an RBI single.

Volpe, who went 2-for-3 with a double, walk, two steals, three runs scored and a few strong defensive plays — all of which earned him various “Volpe” chants throughout the night — drilled the two-out grand slam off erratic reliever Daniel Hudson, the second pitcher in the Dodgers’ bullpen game.

Hudson threw a slider near the bottom of the zone and Volpe pounced on it, sneaking it just over the fence in left field for a moment that he dreamed of growing up “probably every night.”

“I think I pretty much blacked out as soon as I saw it go over the fence,” Volpe said.

The crowd did, too, which was fitting given Volpe was once one of them.

“It’s like you finally got to see the top blow off Yankee Stadium in a World Series game,” Boone said.

Inside the dugout, Alex Verdugo said, “It just felt like a big exhale.”

That was tested when the Dodgers scored a pair of runs in the fifth inning to make it 5-4, but Wells provided some breathing room with a solo shot in the sixth.

The rookie catcher, who was out of the lineup in Monday’s Game 3 and entered Tuesday batting just .093 (4-for-43) in his first postseason, finished the night 2-for-3, adding a double and a walk.

The night began in familiar fashion as Freddie Freeman clubbed a two-run homer off Gil — he has homered in every game this series — in the top of the first inning to take some air out of the building.

But the Yankees did not let it kill them as they fought back to see another day.

“We want to go back to LA,” Verdugo said.