He had already spun out of the grasp of one Parkland High School defender, juked another and stiff-armed a third to the turf.

Now Saquon Barkley was barreling down the sideline with only one potential tackler blocking his path to the end zone.

Barkley, then 17, was still a decade away from signing with his home-state Philadelphia Eagles and leading them all the way to Super Bowl LIX on Sunday. As a teenager, the biggest game of Barkley’s life was this clash between the two top-ranked high school football teams in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley.

When Barkley was a junior, his Whitehall team lost twice against rival Parkland, once in league play and a second time in the district playoffs. Afterward, Barkley vowed that he would not lose again to Parkland as a senior.

The last man for Barkley to beat on this play was Jarey Elder, a future all-state cornerback who also happened to be one of Barkley’s good friends. Elder tried to take down Barkley by going high and driving at his midsection. Barkley leaped over him anyway, the contact slowing him just enough for two other Parkland players to drag him down from behind.

“I’m 5-10 and he just about cleared me,” Elder told Yahoo Sports. “After the play, I turned to their head coach on the sideline and said, 'I’m going to be on ESPN, huh?’”

Elder can take solace that he is far from the only opposing player that Barkley has jumped over. For years, Barkley has displayed a superhuman talent for clearing would-be tacklers like he’s running the 110 hurdles.

As a freshman at Penn State in 2015, Barkley introduced himself to football fans outside the Lehigh Valley when he burst through a hole, left a Buffalo safety grasping at air and didn’t even break stride when he landed. Later that same season, Barkley went airborne against Illinois, leaving his feet at the 4-yard line, soaring over a cornerback and landing in the end zone.

Barkley was such a prolific leaper in college that Penn State fans created a compilation video of some of his hurdles. The most jaw-dropping one is Barkley catching a third-and-6 swing pass at Iowa, jumping over a first-team All-American cornerback and breaking another tackle in midair to keep a key fourth-quarter drive alive.

The gravity-defying highlights didn’t stop after Barkley was drafted No. 2 overall by the Giants in 2018 and had to adapt to facing NFL defenses. There was this hurdle at the expense of Pittsburgh Steelers defensive back Mike Hilton. And this Penn State-on-Penn State crime against Chicago Bears safety Adrian Amos.

Of course, the play that left his Philadelphia Eagles teammates in awe and head coach Nick Sirianni “speechless” was Barkley’s reverse hurdle against Jacksonville this past November.

Having already made two defenders miss in open space, Barkley found himself with his back to Jaguars cornerback Jarrian Jones. Barkley blindly leapfrogged the 5-11 Jones, landed on his feet and tacked an extra 5 yards onto a 14-yard gain.

"It was the best play I've ever seen," Sirianni said after the game. "What I think is so cool, there's going to be kids all over the country and all over Philadelphia trying to make that play and talking about that play and simulating that play as they play backyard football or peewee football.”

Then Sirianni got realistic.

“They ain't going to be able to make it,” he added “I think he's the only one in the world that can do that.”

The backward hurdle floored even those who have known Barkley the longest. Otherwise they aren’t surprised whenever he pulls his best Grant Holloway impression on the football field.

Ramie Moussa became intrigued by Barkley before he could recognize his face. The former Whitehall offensive line coach observed the JV team early in Barkley’s freshman year and noticed that the young running back’s calves were bigger than other players’ thighs.

“Holy s***,” Moussa remembers thinking. “This kid is different.”

Eventually, Moussa discovered how right he was. Not only did Barkley blossom into an all-state running back, he also showcased unusual jumping ability.

Every Friday, Whitehall football players would participate in team challenges. One week it might be an arm wrestling contest. The next, egg toss or tug of war. Anytime the Whitehall coaches organized a jump-off, none of Barkley’s teammates were any match for him.

When Barkley was a junior, he and his teammates did box jumps onto 45-pound rubber plates. Whitehall coaches stacked the plates higher and higher until Barkley was the only one left. Then, Moussa says, they “kept adding plates and adding plates and adding plates” because Barkley asked to keep going.

The competition went similarly the following year when Whitehall players leaped stacks of agility bags on the practice field. Barkley won, then again asked to keep going.

“We ran out of bags, so we had to stop the challenge,” former Whitehall head coach Brian Gilbert told Yahoo Sports. “If we had more bags, he would have kept jumping.”

As a senior at Whitehall, Barkley dabbled in two other sports besides football. As a varsity basketball player, he made up for a wayward jump shot with his transition dunks and ability to outrebound taller players in traffic. In track and field, he qualified for the Pennsylvania state meet with a 21-foot, 2.5-inch long jump.

Taking advantage of his jumping talents on the football field was trickier for Barkley because Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association rules forbade it. A few times, Barkley drew a 15-yard penalty for instinctually hurdling a defender, including his leap over Elder in the Parkland game.

“He’d be the first to smack himself in the head for it, but when they’re diving at your legs, what are you going to do?” Gilbert said. “I can’t tell you I had any other athletes called for it."

Freed from the PIAA rule book once he arrived at Penn State, Barkley unleashed the full extent of his hurdling prowess. It became as much a weapon for Barkley as his spin move and stutter step, his dead leg juke and jump cuts.

“It forces second-level defenders, in particular, to be a little bit more passive in the way they approach tackling him,” said former Penn State running backs coach Charles Huff, now the head coach at Southern Miss. “When you know a guy may jump over you, you’re a little less likely to play as fast and shoot at his ankles. You don’t want to be the guy on ESPN getting jumped over.”

Barkley has credited his “God-given instincts” when asked how he leaps over defenders, but Huff argues he’s selling himself short. He points out that Barkley studies the tendencies of safeties on film. That gives Barkley an idea of how those players might try to tackle him in the hole or in open space. Then he’s able to consider in advance what moves he might want to deploy.

“Saquon is one of the few guys I’ve been around who, even in college, wanted to know how a particular safety tackles or which of these guys is the least comfortable tackling,” Huff told Yahoo Sports. “When you combine unbelievable athleticism with preparation and experience, that’s how you get some of these wow moments.”

The only potential downside to Barkley’s penchant for leaping over defenders is that he’s putting his body at risk. That’s a concern, his former coaches admit, but not a reason to tell him not to do it anymore.

“If the guy’s gonna hurdle, the guy’s gonna hurdle,” said former Penn State offensive coordinator Joe Moorhead, now the head coach at Akron. “You don’t want to take away his improvisational skills. That’s like taking the paint brush out of Picasso’s hands.”

It wouldn’t be too surprising to see Barkley try to leap over a Kansas City Chiefs defender in open space during Super Bowl LIX on Sunday, but don’t count on him bringing back the reverse hurdle he pulled off in November. During an appearance on Air It Out in November, Barkley said, “I have no intentions of doing that again.”

Barkley’s former coaches also point out that he’s not jumping over guys for social media clout. Every spin, every hurdle, every jump cut that Barkley does is with the purpose of helping his team win.

That much was obvious to Elder a decade ago the night that Barkley leaped over him.

After Whitehall snapped its losing streak against Parkland, Elder’s teammates poked fun at him about getting hurdled. Barkley, Elder says, “only cared that his team got the win.”