I couldn’t watch the Bears’ kick. I turned away from the screen, put my hands on my son Harry’s shoulders, muttered something about winning or losing together as a family, and prepared for the worst. I watched his face as he watched the kick fly across the TV screen. The first “doink” showed in his eyes—they got wide and incredulous—and by the time Cris Collinsworth announced, hashtagishly, “Double Doink!,” I had turned back to the screen for the replay, while Harry picked up his phone and caught his crazy father screaming, “It. Hit. The. Post!”

After the screaming ended and the emotions cooled (“You kind of smell,” my wife told me later, on hugging me after the victory) and Harry had gone back to playing Fortnite, I was left on the couch to ponder the mystery and wonder of the Eagles’ quarterback, Nicholas Edward Foles, the twenty-nine-year-old six-feet-six Texan from Austin’s Westlake High School. Foles is the Eagles’ onetime franchise Q.B. who became a backup, and who then became a real-life Rocky—a disrespected has-been who quit the game, only to come back to win it all in 2018, and who is now defying the nonbelievers again.

All the script needs is a few lines like those from Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator” to fluff the story into Hollywood dimensions: “The general who became a slave. The slave who became a gladiator. But now the people want to know how the story ends . . . ” Indeed, we do. Has there ever been a N.F.L. hero like Nick Foles? He looks more like a mall employee than a gridiron icon, a skinny and sallow fellow with a Shaggy-from-Scooby-Doo-like bearing. His throwing motion is a languid shrug, and his passes carve loopy, floaty arcs that seem certain to be intercepted until they settle softly into his receivers’ hands. On the field, he has no obvious rare athletic endowments that explain his success; only in the locker room, it is said by his teammates, is his special gift apparent, earning him his rude Philly nickname. As a leader, he is a doer, not an exhorter. Miked up on the sidelines during the 2018 Super Bowl, Foles sounds more like Napoleon Dynamite than General Maximus directing the troops.

Is there something about Foles’s style of playing Q.B. that explains his success? On Sunday, according to the football analyst Sam Monson, seventy per cent of Foles’s passes were thrown in 2.5 seconds or less, twenty per cent faster than the next-quickest Q.B. in the playoff games last weekend. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three . . . and the ball is out. Foles was a seriously good basketball player in high school, and he plays football like he’s still on the court, sliding and dishing like a point guard. His wonderful jump-ball hookups with the wide receiver Alshon Jeffery—such as the third-and-nine pass to Jeffery on the final winning drive that put the Eagles on the Bears’ two-yard line—seem imbued with hardwood intelligence.

But you can’t capture the Foles magic in a stat line; it’s like trying to catch water in a net. The Eagles were beaten in almost every major offensive category on Sunday; if you looked only at the statistics, you would be certain that the Bears had won. The difference was that final drive: once again, Foles was unbelievably clutch with everything on the line. No other quarterback in playoff history has a higher rating as a passer than Nick Foles currently holds, although he’s thrown a lot fewer passes than some on the list, such as Drew Brees, who attended the same high school ten years before Foles did, set all the records that Foles broke, wears the same number, 9, and faces him on Sunday. After losing his first playoff game (to the Brees-led Saints, in 2014), Foles has won four in a row; in two of those victories, the Eagles were behind at the half. He is 11–3 during the last two seasons in games played in December or later. He is that rare athlete who performs at his best when the stakes are highest, and goes about his heart-stopping work with utter calm. “It’s scary calm,” Coach Pederson said of Foles, the day after the Bears game. “You wonder sometimes if he’s got a pulse.” And even when Foles doesn’t play that well—against the Bears he had a mediocre game at best, including two interceptions—he inspires his team to stay in the game and find a way to win.

Perhaps God is on St. Nick’s side? Football players and coaches do a lot of praying, at every level of the game. When I played in high school, we always prayed before the game. And, though you weren’t supposed to be praying to win the game, you kind of sneaked that in there. In his book, “Believe It,” produced after the Super Bowl win, Foles writes about how his deep Christian faith has helped him to develop an identity off the football field, one that makes the on-field hazards—not just the extraordinary pressure of the game but also the mistakes, bad luck, and injuries, including the concussions with potentially lasting consequences—easier to absorb without losing your equilibrium. But many players in the N.F.L. are also strong believers, including Cody Parkey, the Bears kicker who suffered the double doink. On Sunday, as the team was leaving the locker room, several Eagles players spoke of Foles’s magic rather than his faith. You don’t have to be a believer to believe in Nick Foles. If the team believes in his magic—the defensive lineman Chris Long built a small shrine to St. Nick in his locker before the Texans game—then maybe that’s all that matters.

The Eagles picked Foles in the third round of the 2012 draft. He was picked eighty-eighth over all, and not before six other quarterbacks had already been taken by other teams. Andrew Luck, the first pick, and Russell Wilson, the seventy-fifth, are now franchise cornerstones for the Colts and the Seahawks, where Wilson has won a Super Bowl. Robert Griffin III, the second pick, is a third-string backup for the Baltimore Ravens; the other three—Ryan Tannehill, the eighth pick, Brandon Weeden, the twenty-second, and Brock Osweiler, the fifty-seventh—are bouncing around the N.F.L., mostly as backups, too.

In 2012, Andy Reid was then in his final year of coaching the Eagles, and Michael Vick was the quarterback. As a rookie, Foles got some playing time, because Vick was frequently injured, but the team went 4–12 and Reid was fired by the team’s owner, Jeffrey Lurie, who replaced him with Chip Kelly for the 2013 season. Foles took over when Vick pulled a hamstring in the Giants game at the Meadowlands—Harry and I were in the stands that day—and, in the ensuing weeks, the Q.B. went on a remarkable run, peaking in the Oakland game in which he threw for seven touchdowns and earned a perfect passing rating, the only time any quarterback has done both at the same time. Was Foles the Messiah? The fans embraced the unmuscular Christian, and Foles loved the city right back, especially the strong strain of family that runs through Eagles fandom. The Eagles won their division that year and hosted New Orleans in the wild-card round, but lost 26–24 to Drew Brees in a game they would have won if Riley Cooper makes that catch at the end. But let’s not rehash that.