Rich Hofmann: Six Eagles still chasing Super Bowl ring, going into fifth NFC Championship Game

"The way we're playing right now as a unit - I'm talking about every phase - I think that we're playing some pretty good ball. I think that you can put us up, if not the best, I think as one of the best units to play together. Every unit has picked up their game. Every unit is pulling their weight. There's no unit lagging behind or whatever you want to call it. Every unit is pulling its weight. In key moments in each game, you see each unit, whether it's a kickoff return, whether it's a punt return, whether it's the offense converting a third-and-20, or whether it's the defense stopping somebody on fourth-and-1, every unit is holding up its end of the bargain. When you have that and everybody is doing their thing, it's a tough team to beat."

Dawkins said, "It's hard for me to look back and say which one team is better than the other but I can tell you that this team is the one with the most ups and downs throughout the year to make it. We've had to do a lot of gelling and coming together and a lot of putting our hands over our ears when it comes to what is going on outside to be able to get to where we are."

For a while there, it seemed almost like this group's birthright to make it to the conference finals. But then came the fallow period: 2005 and the T.O. follies (and McNabb's sport hernia); 2006, and McNabb's knee injury; 2007, the recovery year for the quarterback. There were no birthrights then, except controversy.

But now they are back - McNabb talking on the one hand about how you have to treat it as just another game, Runyan talking on the other hand about the need to raise the team's level of fire.

"You have to come out with that emotional play," Runyan said. "You have to play like that . . . What is the difference [in championship games]? It is how intensely you play."

So there it is: all shapes, all sizes, all approaches. What the six of them share is the experience, not the reaction to the experience. They all took away something different. Those Tampa Bay and Carolina losses were devastating, but McNabb, for instance, refuses to view them as the low points of his career.

"Not at all, not at all," he insisted.

If not low point, then what?

"As opportunities, just like any other regular-season game that we didn't take full advantage of," McNabb said. "Knowing the magnitude of it - obviously, we win and we move on. But, I don't put them as low points in my career."

Which is hard to understand, and not for the first time. But they're all different, all five of the championship experiences, all six of the players, which is the point. *

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