How's Your Hangover?

I'm just in from the trip and I've only got a few minutes here while a couple hundred work emails download in the background, but I'm wondering if the mood today is as positive -- or at least non-negative -- as it was yesterday.

I haven't seen the papers yet or even looked around much on the Internet, so I'm really only going by what I see in my inbox and on a couple of blogs, but overall I'm a little surprised there's not more angst here.  I've argued as much as anyone that this Eagles team doesn't have the look of a traditional Super Bowl champion, but that doesn't change the fact that as of yesterday:

1. There were four teams still playing.
2. The Eagles had beaten two of them already.
3. The Cardinals still weren't all that good.
4. And the Eagles were favored.

No disrespect to the Cardinals intended with those statements, but yesterday was a classic big play / who came out more prepared type game.  The Cardinals showed up from the beginning, so they deserved to win*, while the Eagles defense seemed to forget early on that tackling and physicality are still kind of important in this game.  Once things settled down, the Eagles were the better squad.

Unfortunately, if the beginning of the game fit into one kind of classic template, the ending was even more according to type.  The Eagles had 14 chances on the Cards' last scoring drive to make the One Play that would have ended that game.  Such a play was not made. 

I guess having some more playmakers around wouldn't be such a bad thing.

Big picture, it was a nice season.  When your 5-5-1 squad rips off a huge hot streak and makes the conference championship game, yeah, that's some good stuff.

But this is not a year like most years in the NFL.  There's not that one loaded team no one else can touch.  Two of the final four teams had no running games to speak of.  A third had a rookie QB.  The fourth looks a little more legit, but still is led by a QB whose weekly injury report is legitimately unnerving. 

All we needed to do was to win this game and then maybe get a couple lucky bounces two weeks from now. 

We could have had this thing.

I'm not so sure we should all be quite as satisfied as we are right now.

-----------------------

*  In other words, I'm not ragging your team you loser Arizona fans who have nothing better to do than to spam my comments.  Congratulations and enjoy your butt-whupping two weeks from now.