NFL

MANGINI CAN BE PROUD

FOXBOROUGH, Mass. – When the end arrived at last, it brought silence to this place that has seen such football wonders across the past few years. For most of the previous 15 minutes, Gillette Stadium had been a raucous, ribald wall of sound, close to 69,000 voices colliding in joy at the inevitableness of the whole evening.

And then, suddenly, there was nothing.

“That,” Kerry Rhodes would say, “is the greatest sound of all.”

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Jay Feely had swung his right leg around, booted the football purely and cleanly from 34 yards away, and most of the regulars at Gillette Stadium didn’t bother to see the end result to fasten a lock on their vocal cords. The Jets’ sideline didn’t wait long, either, exploding onto the field, galloping everywhere, hugging, slapping, laughing, pointing at the scoreboard.

Freezing Jets 34, Patriots 31 in their memories, just as it was on the board.

“I feel like I just played three games,” said Dustin Keller, the rookie tight end who announced himself grandly last night with a remarkable eight-catch effort.

Every time Brett Favre needed to make a play – meaning every time the Jets were desperate for a play to keep alive their hopes of a division title – he looked toward Keller and his gluey fingers.

“It was almost like a dream,” he would say. “An incredible dream for me.”

The whole game was. The whole night was. For the first 25 minutes, the Jets looked like the most unbeatable, invulnerable team on the planet, racing to a 24-6 lead, looking like they could name their score, unplugging the electricity at Gillette Stadium.

Then, over the next 25 minutes, they were nothing short of – all together now – the Same Old Jets, allowing Matt Cassel to slip into Tom Brady’s uniform, allowing the Patriots to come back, tie the game at 24, send Jets fans from Montauk to Mohonk and everywhere in between into spasm and shivers of harsh, awful memory.

And what nobody could know was this:

That was all prologue. That was all just warm-up.

“Ebbs and flows,” an almost beatific-looking Eric Mangini said later on. “Back and forth. You have to reload and finish the game.”

The Jets reloaded, with Favre engineering an astonishing 14-play, 67-yard drive that covered seven minutes and six seconds of real time but really seemed to cover about 40-odd years worth of frustration, futility and flabbergast.

And even that heroic march seemed utterly meaningless when Cassel mounted his own desperate charge, eight plays and 62 yards in 63 seconds capped by Randy Moss’ description-defying touchdown grab with one second to play.

“Good teams,” Mangini would say, “know how to get up from something like that.”

And, really, wasn’t that what we’ve been searching for with these Jets all across the season’s first 11 weeks?

Haven’t we wanted to know if they really were a good team – maybe even a very good one – one worth investing the hopes and hurt feelings of 40 years in?

Were they the juggernaut that pasted the Cardinals and the Rams? Were they the jokers that somehow lost to the awful Raiders and nearly fell to the awful-ler Chiefs?

“We needed to win this game,” Favre would say, “for ourselves.”

Now comes the craziest part of all: They did. Overtime started with a 5-yard sack, and then a third-and-15 with what sounded like all of New England and Old England bearing down on them. Then Favre hit Keller for 16 yards and things got a little quieter. Three more first downs diminished the din even more.

And then Feely finished them all off, sent them on a long trip home along Route 1, sent the Jets into yelps of glee and into one of the more rarefied places they have ever been.

First place, AFC East, six games to go.

“I’m pretty proud of the way we finished,” said Mangini, and he should be proud of them, and of himself, and of this game that seemed custom-fitted from the Jets’ personal Playbook from Hell, yet somehow seemed to announce something new, something fresh. And maybe something very, very real.

michael.vaccaro@nypost.com

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