“It had that major atmosphere because it got so hard,” DiMarco said. “Pars were good scores. To make a birdie, you almost had to get a good bounce or a good break. The only difference was the greens were soft. If the greens were hard, even par would have won.”

DiMarco had moved within striking distance when he played the front nine in 32. He then pulled into a tie with Woods and Perry, who was just about to go into free fall down the leaderboard, at 6 under when he made a 9-footer for birdie at the 14th hole.

When he played the par-5 16th, DiMarco actually held sole possession of the lead. Woods had just bogeyed No. 11 to drop back to 5 under when he hit a wedge over the green and was unable to convert the 6-footer for par.

A bogey at the 17th hole proved to be DiMarco’s undoing. His 7-iron approach -- “I guess we misclubbed,” he would later say -- sailed over the green and DiMarco couldn’t get up and down.

DiMarco, who lost to Woods in a playoff at the Masters, still had a shot at the 18th hole. His 20-footer for birdie from the collar, though, ran 2 feet by and the Floridian went to the clubhouse to watch the final holes with friends.

Woods may have broken out of the tie with DiMarco at the 16th hole but he was certainly not assured of victory -- not when he had played the 18th hole in a cumulative 4 over in his first five NEC Invitationals and had already made double there this week.

Woods, though, used the adrenaline from the birdie at the 16th hole to carry him the rest of the way. He persevered despite sending his drive on the final hole into the left rough. He calmly navigated his second shot between a pair of trees and onto the collar for the closing par.

“I used it as a motivational thing to try and keep me going. I made sure I kept my juices up because I’d had so many missed putts, and finally I had something positive,” Woods said.

“There’s always hope,” DiMarco said. “Unfortunately, if you’re hoping for him too make a bogey, you didn’t do what you needed to do out there. Again, who would have thought of me shooting 2 under and him being four shots ahead of me that I would have had a chance.

“But that just shows how great this golf course is and how tough it is.”

Perry would certainly agree. He saw a two-stroke lead evaporate as he made five bogeys in a six-hole stretch that began on the ninth hole.

“This is not much to say except I played lousy,” Perry said. “Things were going fine there for a while. But then I hit two bad drives that put me in jail, and after that I was done.”