Longtime Hoboken head football coach Lou Taglieri was teaching a class at school when his phone rang.

He didn’t recognize the number, so he didn’t answer. Instead, he sent the unidentified caller to his voicemail.

At lunchtime, Taglieri noticed that the person left a voice message. It was Eli Manning asking him to please call him back.

Taglieri’s initial thought: Who on God’s green Earth was calling him, and pretending to be Giants quarterback Eli Manning?

About a half hour later, Taglieri remembered that former Giants linebacker Mathias Kiwanuka was always around the team, on the sidelines during home games at JFK Stadium, and he used Hoboken’s weight room. He thought maybe he was the culprit who gave Eli Manning his number.

Taglieri called back, and Eli… answered!

The conversation went something along the lines of:

Eli: Hello?

Taglieri: Eli?

Eli: Yeah, coach! (Taglieri still can’t believe that Manning called him coach.)

It was during the 2011 NFL lockout, and Manning, a Hoboken resident during most of his career, called Taglieri to ask if he could use the field at certain times during the work stoppage.

Taglieri then reached out to the superintendent and athletic director, and it was a no-brainer. A few years prior, Manning donated $10,000 worth of electronics to Hoboken High School, so the very least they could do in return was let him use their field for practice.

Taglieri first met Manning outside the gated entrance to the stadium.

He expected Manning to roll up in a Mercedes or a Maserati. Instead, Manning pulled up in an older Toyota truck.

“I go in the passenger seat, and the first thing I say to him is, ‘What are you doing with this?’” Taglieri recalled. “And he goes, ‘Well, I’m a spokesman for Toyota.’”

Other Giants started to pull up behind Manning — former tight end Kevin Boss and wide receivers Victor Cruz and Hakeem Nicks just to name a few. They were the ones who had the expensive cars.

So, Manning being Manning, called over Taglieri and said, “Coach, that’s why when it’s all over, I’m going to have money and they won’t.”

“You basically saw them as kids just wanting to get things done,” Taglieri said. “And they had no problem after their workout if there was somebody there that wanted something signed or a picture with them.”

The following high school football season, Hoboken finished with a 10-2 record and won the North 2, Group 1 title. The team was looking for donations to get state championship jackets.

“And of course, he donated a nice amount of money so we could get our jackets,” Taglieri said. “That was a nice gesture.”

Taglieri said he still keeps in touch with Manning.

To this day, he says he’s never called him anything but “coach.”

“I’ve never met a classier person than Eli Manning,” Taglieri, who coached Hoboken from 2005 to 2016, said. “He is exactly what you want your child to be. He’s very humble, and he has time for everything. You can’t say enough about somebody like him. It was truly an amazing three weeks working with him.”

Taglieri knows about the ongoing discussion in sports media about whether Eli Manning is a Hall of Famer. He said, “He’s a Hall of Famer in every aspect of life. And he beat Tom Brady twice.”

Odds of Eli Manning making HoF: -300

Elected first time of eligibility: +175

Elected second time or beyond: +300

(Odds courtesy of Bet-NJ.com)

You can’t tell the story of the NFL without Eli Manning.

He defied history with two fourth quarter drives for the ages on the NFL’s biggest stage. He was the dragon slayer of the greatest dynasty in all professional sports.

He isn’t in the same class as his older brother Peyton, or the likes of Joe Montana, Brady, or Dan Marino, some of the immortals to play the position, but he played his role in the history of America’s greatest game.

Since Manning entered the NFL in 2004, only three franchises won multiple Super Bowls — the Patriots, Steelers and the… Giants.

If before Manning’s career even started they were told it would have ended exactly the way it did, all the other 29 NFL franchises would have said, “Sign me up.”

“He never once blamed anybody for anything. He took everything personally and everything was on his shoulders,” Taglieri said. “If you’re the owner of the Giants, you wouldn’t want anyone other than Eli Manning as your quarterback. He was strait-laced, never in trouble, and he was just what you needed at the time. He wasn’t a phony. What you saw was what you got.”

Eli Manning wasn’t the perfect quarterback. He was far from it.

But he was the perfect quarterback for New York.