In an elimination game, Luis Gil served a two-run homer in the first inning and a leadoff double in the second. The phone rang in the bullpen and Mark Leiter Jr. was the first to take the mound to warm up.

Leiter, with his arm ready, didn’t actually enter the game until the seventh inning. The Yankees not only required near-perfection from their bullpen, but also flexibility.

The group did a brilliant job of keeping the season alive.

On a night when the bottom of the Dodgers’ bullpen was dented, Tim Hill, Clay Holmes, Leiter, Luke Weaver and Tim Mayza were the Yankees’ biggest upside in the 11-4, survival-turned-blowout in Game 4 in The Bronx on Tuesday.

“It’s incredible to be a part of and watch,” Holmes, who recorded four outs without being touched, said of the bullpen’s effort. “These games need everyone.”

It took that quintet, who combined to allow one hit and one walk in five scoreless innings, to finally tame the Dodgers’ offense.

The best offense in baseball hit Gil on Tuesday (four innings, four runs) and hit plenty of Yankees pitchers in the first three games, but couldn’t solve a Yankees relay race that started with Hill.

The left-hander inherited a runner on first base in the fifth and allowed a single to Shohei Ohtani — the final Dodgers hit of the game.

Hill pitched well enough to escape the jam, getting a pair of ground balls from Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman, but a run scored when the toss from Gleyber Torres to Anthony Volpe was too high to complete a double play.

With Freeman on first base, Holmes came in and needed one pitch to eliminate Teoscar Hernandez. He stayed sharp through a 12-pitch sixth inning, retiring Kiké Hernandez and Max Muncy.

“That’s a good setup. There’s not a lot of chasing there,” said Holmes, whose 2024 postseason ERA is 2.31. “It’s one of those things where you have to attack in the zone and throw your best stuff.”

Leiter, five innings after hurriedly getting ready, replaced Holmes for the seventh.

“That’s a difficult one. That’s true,” Leiter said of a night when he got hot and then had to stay warm. “I think that’s really hard to do in general… but I do believe the playoffs show a different aspect where you expect that a little bit more because every inning could be the leverage. Any moment can be the turning point.”

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He refused to let the Dodgers’ lineup find a turning point. He struckout Will Smith and walked Tommy Edman, giving Ohtani the tying run in a two-run game. Ohtani spun through a nasty splitter for the full count, the kind of splitter that was a reminder of why the Yankees traded for Leiter at the deadline.

Weaver replaced Leiter and blew heat past Mookie Betts to send the game to the eighth, where the Yankees closed in on Freeman, Teoscar Hernandez and Muncy.

Weaver appeared to be Aaron Boone’s choice for the ninth – which would have meant a seven-out outing – but the Yankees offense exploded for five runs in the eighth, making Mayza a rare October mop-up man (if a mop-man man could exist in a World Series game). Mayza threw a clean final frame.

If Weaver, who last recorded seven outs on May 4, had to get through parts of three innings again, so be it.

“I said it in my head — ‘I said it in my head,’ I probably thought — I came today ready to throw three innings if I had to,” the affable Weaver said. “I wanted to leave it all on the line.”