10 years ago, Eagles filled us all with hope

The week began with the Sunday before. At Soldier Field in Chicago, as a slight underdog, the Eagles knocked the Bears out of the second round of the NFL playoffs and set up their first visit to the NFC Championship Game under Andy Reid. It was a game when quarterback Donovan McNabb, playing in his hometown, was at his rambunctious, rollicking best. It also was a game effectively decided before halftime when defensive end Hugh Douglas knocked Bears quarterback Jim Miller out of the game on a hit that the NFL later decided was worth a $35,000 fine.

Even as the Eagles dressed in the locker room and answered questions about their unexpected, exciting and formidable future - a championship game at St. Louis, against a Rams team featuring an offense nicknamed "The Greatest Show on Turf" - construction workers began hammering and dismantling the stadium, starting a major renovation. It was noisy, poetic punctuation, because the Eagles were building, too, and the progress was undeniable. They were assembling something great, and the skeptics were in witness protection.

It was January 2002, 10 years ago, when we were all virgins.

Here and now, it is so hard to remember what it was like - for fans to approach a big moment with hope untinged by dread. This season, Reid and everybody who follows this team will watch while shackled to the memories of 13 previous autumns. If they make another playoff run next season, it will be to the accompaniment of this neverending loop from the past, of Joe Jurevicius and Ricky Manning Jr. and the Zapruder-like search for vomit on the Super Bowl highlight film, and club president Joe Banner making a postgame reference to the definition of insanity in Arizona.

It wasn't like that in 2002. Back then, we didn't even know who Ricky Manning Jr. was.

The baggage that Philadelphia people carried then was historic, not intrinsic to Reid and McNabb and that group. At that point, it had been almost 19 years since any major professional team in the city had won a championship, and more than 40 years since the Eagles had, and that was a real and prominent topic of conversation. But it was different, something for which Reid and McNabb and the rest were not blamed. They were victims then, paying for the sins of their forebears. But the burden was not theirs, not really.

One of the great sporting clichés is "playing with house money" - and those Eagles most definitely were. The house money was hanging out of their pockets, in fact. It was Reid's third season and McNabb's third season and they were in the championship game, ahead of any preordained schedule.

It was a lark.

It is what people crave again.

As somebody who has written that Reid deserves this upcoming season, I can still recognize how exhausted everyone is. Thinking back to that first championship game for Reid's Eagles just brings it home even more. It was such a pure time. The Eagles were big underdogs - 12-point underdogs - playing in a dome where the Rams still hadn't been stopped by the NFL from pumping in ridiculous amounts of artificial noise when the visiting team was trying to call signals.

It was an impossible place. The Eagles weren't supposed to win. The team itself had a different mindset, but for the people outside, it was a chance to see a young quarterback and a young coach grow up, for this franchise to leap a few extra steps on the staircase to the top. It was an opportunity, period. It was going to be a great learning experience or it was going to be an unforgettable fantasy. There was no conceivable downside.

When the Eagles lost, 29-24, there were two enduring thoughts. One was "52 yards away," which is how close the Eagles got on the game's last-minute drive, the one that ended with McNabb throwing an interception. The other was the story of McNabb himself, who was seen by media people standing in the tunnel entrance and watching as the Rams celebrated on the field and then as they received the championship trophy.

McNabb was not ripped for the fumble that started the game or for the interception that ended it. The portrait of him watching the Rams' celebrate was seen as symbolic of McNabb's desire for greatness, of another step in a growing young quarterback's inevitability. People were not even that upset that the Eagles lost, if you can believe it.

Because there were good things ahead. The Eagles felt that way; everybody felt that way.

It was a time when people still dreamed.

It seems like more than a decade ago.

Send email to hofmanr@phillynews.com, or read his blog, The Idle Rich, at www.philly.com/TheIdleRich. For recent columns go to www.philly.com/RichHofmann.