PHILADELPHIA – The Eagles had called timeout, because that’s what teams always do in this situation, especially when the opposing kicker has looked as jittery as a guy whose morning coffee has been sabotaged with Sanka. There were three minutes and 59 seconds to go in overtime. The score was 23-all.

There were maybe 90 seconds left in Jay Feely’s career as a Giant if he couldn’t figure out a way to kick the football straight and true from 36 yards away.

“I like it when the other team calls timeout,” Jay Feely would say a little bit later. “It gives me extra time to concentrate and focus on what I need to do.”

The 67,443 people inside Lincoln Financial Field didn’t quite believe that. There wasn’t a football fan alive who wasn’t aware of the furious funk in which Feely found himself the past few weeks.

His travails in Seattle two weeks before had become an instant national punchline. Dane Cook had portrayed him in a “Saturday Night Live” sketch last weekend. Psychiatrists had weighed in on Feely’s “mindset.” Golfers everywhere shook their head in solidarity; they know the yips when they see them.

Eagles fans weren’t quite as empathetic.

Midway through the timeout, they began to roar. Feely could hear them. He could sense something was up, but he was too deep into his own thing to notice.

Up on the two-story-high video boards on either side of the stadium, behind both goal posts, they had already cued up a video montage of Jay Feely’s Greatest Misses. It was a one-man Football Follies Film. And Feely didn’t see any of it.

“I heard the music, and it sounded pretty eerie,” he would say.

He had to make this kick, of course, not only for himself but for his reputation, for his future employment, and for the other 52 members of the Giants who’d been unbelievably patient and kind to him the last two weeks. It hadn’t been easy. They knew that losing to Seattle probably cost them any chance of gaining the No. 1 seed in the NFC playoffs. They knew that as much as nobody inside that locker room had pointed a finger directly at Feely, he had missed not once, not twice, but three times at winning that game.

And then missed again last week, against the Cowboys.

And they also knew that somehow, against an Eagles team they should have long since buried, on an afternoon when they absolutely had to take a win back to the Turnpike with them, they were in the midst of an overtime torture

chamber. The Redskins had already won. The Cowboys had barely survived the Chiefs. The Giants needed to hold serve.

And they needed their kicker to be what they’d hired him to be. “We have faith in Jay,” Eli Manning would say. “That hasn’t changed.”

It was a nice thing to say. And yet the Giants sideline was a taut bundle of nerves as the team lined up for the deciding snap. Every eye was on Feely, of course. Every mind was thinking good thoughts. Or trying to.

The snap was clean. The placement was true.

The kick was pure.

“When you do this long enough,” Feely would say, “then you know if it’s going to be good the second the ball leaves your foot.”

He meant it, too. As soon as the ball cleared the line of scrimmage, Feely punched the chilly sky with a defiant fist.

Everyone else decided to wait a little longer. Two weeks ago, Jeremy Shockey had started to dance in front of a camera when he thought he saw Feely’s kick sail through the uprights, when in fact it had drifted to the left. He waited.

Everyone waited. The Eagles fans tried to block the ball with their voices. The Eagles players tried to deflect it with body English.

Didn’t work. The ball sailed through. Feely soon found himself wrapped up in Visanthe Shiancoe’s arms, and soon was in the middle of a giddy pile of Giants, who may have been staggered by this 26-23 escape, but still stood high and alone atop the NFC East, for at least another week.

“Now,” Jay Feely said, “maybe you guys can worry about someone else.”