DETROIT — The coach didn’t see the need to search his soul for profundities. Not after what he’d just seen. Not after what his team had just pulled off.
“Wow,” Rex Ryan said, shaking his head, smiling. “Wow.” Sure, if you’d given him a shot of truth serum, he might have wandered off message a little bit, might’ve used words like “fortunate” and “charmed” and “lucky,” because every member of the Jets’ traveling party understands that every one of those applies.
The Jets were done, they were dead, they were trailing 20-10 and almost out of timeouts and all but out of hope.
“Long as there’s time on the clock, there’s a chance,” Santonio Holmes said, slinging out the last-ditch cliché that infiltrates every lost football cause going all the way back to pee wee. But really, there was no chance, or shouldn’t have been one. The game was careening toward triple zeroes, a squandered opportunity to re-seize control of the AFC East with both the Patriots and Dolphins losing.
PHOTOS: JETS BEAT LIONS, 23-20, IN OT
And then, amazingly, improbably, ridiculously, it wasn’t. Then Mark Sanchez was leading a touchdown drive, and Lions coach Jim Schwartz was gift-wrapping an early Christmas present with some dreadful play-calling, and Detroit’s Julian Peterson was getting hammered with a dumb-as-a-stick personal foul for hitting LaDainian Tomlinson out of bounds . . .
And then Nick Folk hit a field goal.
And another.
“And all of a sudden you look up,” said Holmes, whose 52-yard reception was the killer play in overtime, “and it’s us 23 and them 20, and you just thank whoever you have to thank and head back to the locker room.”
Or, as Ryan had put it: Wow.
Here’s the thing: Yes, there’s plenty to dislike about the Jets right now. For the game’s first 55 minutes, the offense remained stuck in neutral, making it 10 points in almost two hours of football over the last two weeks. The defense, the calling-card defense, had its moments, and was able to stop the Lions late when they were reduced to a backup quarterback, but Matthew Stafford had a mostly delightful afternoon picking it apart.
Most puzzling, the swaggerlicious Jets seemed genuinely cowed by the Lions and their hard-hitting, trash-talking ways, an odd tack for a 2-6 team to take, an odder one for a now 6-2 team to swallow.
“They’re a good football team but by far the dirtiest football team I’ve ever played against since I played the Tennessee Titans,” said Bart Scott, who was hit with his own unsportsmanlike flag in the first half. “I swear to God, I hope to see them again.”
They won’t, not this year, and for now the Jets will have to content themselves with this: After a year and a half of warning us that they do not subscribe to the same fate as the Same Old Jets of lore, their last two victories have proven it. They pulled a rabbit out of their helmets three weeks ago in Denver, then pulled a magic quarter out of their ears at Ford Field yesterday. You can say that the Broncos are awful, that the Lions are worse, that the two teams against whom the Jets pulled these great escapes are 4-12 and should have no business being in position to beat a team that still fancies itself a championship contender.
And you might be right.
But as Ryan said: “That’s what good teams do, they find a way to win. We got the win. We’ll take it.”
They’ll take it and they’ll lug themselves to Cleveland in six days to take on the suddenly rejuvenated Browns, fresh off a stunning slaughter of the Patriots and playing splendid football on the watches of a coach named Eric Mangini and a defensive coordinator named Rob Ryan. It’ll be a week of interesting storylines and dodging doubters who will point out that 6-2 could easily be 2-6 with a bounce here, a roll there, a break over here.
“Maybe people will think we’re fortunate to get the win,” Ryan said. “But we don’t care.”
Nor should they. Not in a league where you’re as good as your record.
And not when that record is good for first place in the AFC East again.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com