Finally!

Deliverance. Sweet deliverance.

Under a full moon, on a wind-lashed night, when the cold went clean to the bone, the professional football team of Philadelphia at long last moved out of the intersection of Misery and Despair, where it had sat, stalled, for a generation.

The star-crossed Eagles are going to the Super Bowl. Roll that one around on your tongue. Go ahead. Tease your taste buds with it. The Eagles and the Super Bowl. This is neither dream nor mistake nor typo. Open your window and look up in the sky, where pigs, indeed, now fly.

Deliverance. Sweet deliverance.

The Eagles are going to the Super Bowl. They are going to play for the championship that they last won in 1960, 45 anguished years ago. Ah, but football is a game of flesh and bone, and those are mere numbers, 1960 and 45, cold and impersonal, and they do not tell you, really, how long it has been.

This is how long: If you were just coming of legal age when the Birds last won a championship, you are now collecting Social Security. That is a lifetime. Literally.

Deliverance. Sweet deliverance.

The team that has won more games than anyone else in the NFC in the last four years but has been known more for the games it lost, is going to the Super Bowl, for only the second time in its history, and for the first time since 1981.

The Birds were known as the Super Bowl team that never actually went there. They were more overdue than the library book you've forgotten in the back of your closet.

Yesterday, they cashed in. They made good on all those expectations.

Deliverance. Sweet deliverance.

After three consecutive years of inglorious, ignominious flameouts in the NFC championship game, the one they couldn't win and that hung around them like the chains of Jacob Marley's ghost, they beat the Atlanta Falcons, 27-10.

They did it by playing smart, playing aggressively, playing error-free. This time, there was no backing off. There was no head-scratching, what-the-heck-is-that-supposed-to-be play calling that had been their downfall before.

Quarterback Donovan McNabb, who had performed horribly in the NFC title games, was coolly efficient. He managed the game effectively, and he did not turn the ball over even once.

And the Eagles' defense, its strongest suit, muffled the wondrous Michael Vick, the Falcons quarterback. He was bewitched by the Eagles' scheme of blitzes and forced to run in ever-widening circles of confusion.

This was a game layered with added emotion, by the anticipation of weather most foul and furious, of a Siberian winter that would only help embellish the tales you would tell your grandchildren around the tribal campfires.

Well, the storm came, as advertised, but given such an early-warning advance notice, the stadium crew did yeoman's work with relentless round-the-clock plowing and shoveling. Three hours before kickoff, the tarp was as lovingly removed from the playing surface as a groom's tender lifting of his bride's veil.

The workers had reason to be proud - the field was as pristine as is possible deep in January, and for all the pregame debate, its condition did not become a factor until late in the game, after having been chewed.

But the wind was a factor.

It came howling in from the north, the open end of the stadium, and it was a knife-edged punt-killer, slashing at the parka-bundled loyalists. Gusts like freight trains forced strategy to be altered, field goals that would normally have been attempted instead eschewed, and fielding punts was like trying to hit the knuckleball.

It was the wind, according to the prevailing school of thought, that would help the Falcons and hinder the Eagles, the former being a running team first, the latter being a passing team.

Sure enough, the game's first big play was a run.

By the Eagles. By Brian Westbrook.