JASON Whittle’s eyes were heavy and glassed over, his right arm freshly covered with a Band-Aid to cover the puncture mark of his eighth IV needle. There would be hell to pay, of course. His wife, Natalie, had begged him not to play, not while his body still shook with nausea, chills and fever.

“Honey,” he’d said. “This conversation is over. I’m playing.”

Now the Giants’ right guard leaned against his locker, bracing all 305 pounds against the side, aching for a bed. He felt beaten up, inside and out, bloodied, bruised, poked, probed, prodded.

“But still standing, in spite of it all,” he said, weakly.

Not unlike his team.

“Jason defied a lot of odds today,” center Chris Bober, Whittle’s roommate, had marveled. “And in our own way, I guess that’s exactly what we’re trying to do, too.”

The Giants had just gone and thrashed the Cowboys, 37-7, parlaying their most dominant performance of the year with the perfectly-aligned stars that had earlier yielded stunning losses by the Falcons and the Saints. Afterward, Jim Fassel, an expert at cheating 10-counts, handed Whittle a game ball.

“He said I showed a lot of guts today,” Whittle said.

“You left half your guts on the field today,” Michael Strahan quipped as he strolled past.

There is no good reason why the Giants remain in the middle of the NFC’s wild-card chase, two weeks from the end of the regular season, no logical explanation for the way everything fell so perfectly for them.

At 4:10, as they took the field, the Saints were winning and the Falcons were soon to line up for a chip-shot overtime field goal, and it seemed the Giants were about to engage in 60 minutes of meaningless garbage time against the batch of semi-professionals wearing Cowboy helmets.

A half-hour later, the Falcons had lost, the Saints had lost, the Giants were up by three touchdowns, and had once again learned a dear lesson about just how long and how fickle an NFL weekend can really be.

“A lot of guys showed some guts out there,” Fassel said.

None more than Whittle, who wasn’t sure if it were the flu that woke him up at 3 o’clock yesterday morning or an intestinal revolt brought on by a late-night snack of chicken wings and French fries. All he knew was, by the time he arrived at Pascack Valley Hospital, he was ready to be drugged out of his misery.

Natalie Whittle met him there. Yesterday was her 28th birthday, and in two weeks she is due to give birth to the couple’s second child, and to be honest she didn’t need to see her husband wobbling around Giants Stadium yesterday, carrying a complicated cocktail of pharmaceuticals in his bloodstream. She was driving. He was listening to her requests over the rumble of his stomach. She was adamant, but he is from Missouri. They grow them stubborn in Missouri.

“They sedated him and everything, and I got the call that he probably wasn’t going to play today,” Fassel said. “And then he showed up and I kept getting updates and he came and told me, ‘I’m playing.’ “

Whittle would deal with Natalie later. First, he had to answer to a different set of inquisitors.

“There isn’t a guy in this room who wouldn’t have done the same thing out there today,” Whittle said in between soft coughs and fitful sighs. “They don’t pay me to get sick.”

So Whittle played, hoping for the best, a familiar credo in his locker room. Two weeks ago, the Giants were 6-6 and buried beneath a pile of ascendant NFC upstarts. All around the room, players spoke bravely of scratching to 10-6, letting the Saints and the Falcons and the rest deal with their own late-season worries.

“And now,” Strahan said, “we’re halfway there.”

That was enough to make Whittle feel a little better, at least for a little while, until someone asked how he was really feeling.

“Terrible,” he said, and here came a sad, soft laugh, because Natalie was waiting for him outside, and it was still her birthday, and he still felt like the underside of a frat house welcome mat.

“I hope she understands. But I’ve got to get to bed,” he said.

She would have to understand. Whittle’s still got a little bit of football season left in him. Remarkably, almost inexplicably, so do the Giants.