“The toe tag was being prepared early in the night, but the Yankees are not dead yet.” Never have these words rung truer than in Game 4 of the World Series, where two fans’ brazen attempt to snag a ball from Mookie Betts’ glove sparked an unlikely rally bringing down Shohei Ohtani’s World Series hopes.

NFL Hall of Famer Michael Irvin didn’t just defend these ejected Yankees supporters – he crowned them. “These guys are national heroes, what are y’all talking about?” Irvin roared on The Herd with Colin Cowherd on Thursday. “They’re going to be the star at the bar. Hey, aren’t you those guys? You’re the reason we got another game!”

The play that lit the fuse? Brothers Darren and Austin Capobianco grab at Gleyber Torres’ foul ball, wrestling with Betts’ glove along the right-field wall. “Mookie was swearing at us. Not good,” Darren told The Athletic, painting the scene of their hasty exit from Yankee Stadium.

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That moment of mayhem triggered an avalanche. Anthony Volpe, the hometown kid, launched a grand slam that sent 49,354 fans into delirium. “It’s like you finally got to see the top blow off Yankee Stadium in a World Series game,” manager Aaron Boone beamed. Inside the dugout, Alex Verdugo felt “like a big exhale.”

“That’s part of the game,” Irvin barked, drawing from his NFL trenches wisdom. “Y’all got to be real. Had they not grabbed and didn’t touch anything, they would have been the laughingstock for their lives. Social media in New York – the king of rude – would have killed those kids!”

Fan interference ignites Yankees’ World Series fight

The ejected fans missed Torres’ three-run blast that turned a nail-biter into an 11-4 rout. But their legacy was already cemented. “I told him he was my hero for trying to save the Yankees. It’s the championship game,” one fan proclaimed to The Athletic.

Betts, the eight-time All-Star, shrugged off the chaos. “I didn’t even know he grabbed my hand,” he said. “Everything’s cool. We lost the game, that’s what I’m focused on. Turn the page and get ready for tomorrow.”

Meanwhile, Shohei Ohtani got his first hit since partially dislocating his left shoulder in Game 2. The Yankees‘ pulse grows stronger with Game 5 looming. “We’ve got Gerrit Cole lurking [Wednesday],” Anthony Rizzo declared. “We’ve got a pissed off [Carlos] Rodon for Game 6 if we can get out there [to Los Angeles]. And Game 7 is always a crapshoot.”

While no team has ever climbed back from a 3-0 World Series hole, Michael Irvin’s NFL-bred perspective hits differently: “We do what we want to do. We New York!” Sometimes, as the Hall of Famer suggests, it takes two fans reaching over the wall to help their team scale a mountain and Shohei Ohtani can’t be happy about this.