“I’ll never forget when I was here as an assistant in 1988,” he said. “We lost the last game of the year to the New York Jets and didn’t go into the playoffs. The next day he was in the coaches’ meeting room, and he went from coach to coach, shaking everybody’s hand. In 1989 we were in the playoffs and the next year we won the Super Bowl. We never saw him at that time. He didn’t have to be there. He was there when he was needed. He always said and did the right thing.”

Before last Sunday’s game against Denver, Coughlin told his players of Mara’s condition. The Giants won on a touchdown pass from Eli Manning to Amani Toomer with 5 seconds left. In the locker room after the game, the players chanted “Duke, Duke, Duke,” Mara’s nickname.

Manning later said he had been told by one of Mara’s grandsons that the owner awakened in time to see the winning play, then smiled and went back to sleep.

Two other Giants stars, Tiki Barber and Jeremy Shockey, went to Mara’s home on Monday. “We were able to say a prayer and say goodbye, and that meant a lot to me,” Barber said.

Mara always repaid his players — once a Giant, you were a Giant for life.

When former players became ill, Mara would find them doctors, pay their medical expenses and arrange help for their families. Many old-timers were on the payroll as scouts or advisers. Even in this era of sophisticated scouting, it wasn’t unusual for Young or Accorsi to get a call from a former player recommending the Giants look at some prospect.

The team was almost always well aware of the prospect, but Mara never dropped any of those old “scouts” from the payroll.

Mara always considered himself a football man first, running the on-field operations through the 1950s until 1979 while Jack and then Jack’s son Tim ran the business end. The team was successful during the ’50s and early ’60s with such stars as Frank Gifford, Y.A. Tittle, Sam Huff and Roosevelt Brown and a coaching staff that included Tom Landry and Vince Lombardi as assistants.

But after losing to Chicago in the 1963 NFL championship game, the Giants began a long slide, failing to make the playoffs again until 1981 as Wellington and Tim, by then the co-owner, feuded.

In 1979, on the commissioner’s recommendation, the Maras agreed to hire Young as general manager and the team again became a power.

It won Super Bowls in 1986 and 1990 with Bill Parcells coaching a team that starred Lawrence Taylor and Phil Simms and stout defenses. The 1990 team featured one of the best coaching staffs assembled: future head coaches Coughlin, Bill Belichick, Al Groh, Charlie Weis, Romeo Crennel and Ray Handley.

Parcells left after that season and the Giants slipped into the middle of the pack.

They made the Super Bowl again after the 2000 season, losing to the Baltimore Ravens, owned by Art Modell, Mara’s close friend and longtime partner in league matters. Mara never openly criticized Modell’s move from Cleveland and they celebrated getting to the Super Bowl together.

In 1991, Tim Mara and his family sold their share of the team to Robert Tisch. Tisch and Wellington Mara were officially co-owners and Tisch ran much of the business affairs. But it was always clear this was Wellington’s team.

Still, he was never an authoritarian. He would greet players after every game — win or lose — flashing a shy smile at stars and scrubs alike.

“My wife said it best when we talked about Mr. Mara,” said Simms, the quarterback on the Giants Super Bowl teams and now a television analyst. “She said, ’There are so few icons left.’ That’s what Mr. Mara was. He was from an era where there were certain men who handled themselves differently than everybody else. I don’t know if you can be that person anymore in this day and age. I don’t know if society would let you be like him.”

Mara is survived by wife Ann, 11 children and 40 grandchildren. The funeral Mass will be Friday morning at St. Patricks Cathedral in New York.

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