PHILADELPHIA -- Halfway through the tunnel that leads to the visitors locker room at the Edward Jones Dome, just after his team's 29-24 loss to the St. Louis Rams in the NFC championship game last Jan. 27, Donovan McNabb suddenly pivoted and reversed direction, heading back to the field.

For a few minutes, with confetti falling around him, fireworks blasting away and the Rams players celebrating their advance to Super Bowl XXXVI, the Philadelphia Eagles quarterback and unquestioned team leader stood in the shadows and studied the raucous scene unfolding before him.

"I guess I was curious," said McNabb here Monday, recalling the moment from nearly seven months ago. "I just had to see what it was like."

	Reid said McNabb still continues to show steady improvement.

This season, McNabb and the rest of the Eagles want to feel first-hand what it is like to earn a Super Bowl berth. No more living vicariously through friends, former teammates, college buddies. It's "San Diego or Bust" for an Eagles team that has gone through training camp and the preseason with a palpable sense of unfinished business.

A year ago, the pundits tabbed Philadelphia as a chic Super Bowl selection, a young and emerging team capable of going deep into the playoffs. For the 2002 season, the stakes are higher, since the talented Eagles are expected to be among the handful of NFC franchises with enough juice to take home the Vince Lombardi Trophy. Nowhere do the expectations run any deeper than in the Eagles locker room at the superb NovaCare Complex.

The public relations staff here is quick to point out that the locker room at the practice site includes a unique air freshener system. Appropriate, maybe, since most Philadelphia veterans are a symbolic breath of fresh air when it comes to verbalizing their goals. There is, to be sure, no posturing or verbal evasiveness with the Eagles, a team that knows it is good and doesn't intend to fall short again of its goal.

If anything, falling short in the 2001 conference title game has permitted the Eagles to think about going long in '02. This is a team, it seems, galvanized by the five-point differential between itself and the Rams, and confident that it can overcome that gap. Philadelphia outplayed the Rams for the first half of the NFC championship game, leading 17-13 at intermission, so the Holy Grail was certainly within reach.

"We were 30 minutes away," said wide receiver James Thrash. "And we're very aware of that. Getting within sniffing distance of the Super Bowl has just made us that much hungrier now. It took me a long time to get over that loss in the offseason. Actually, I'm still not over it, and I think a lot of guys in here feel the same way. There's only way to wipe out the memories of that game. Go back and win it this time."

Said cornerback Bobby Taylor: "That's the only way to stop the itch."

Thanks to the innovative salary-cap work of team president Joe Banner, who has assured the franchise retains a Super Bowl window of opportunity for several more seasons, the pieces seem to be in place. But in the offseason, as players agonized over the five-point loss to the Rams, the popular question among the country's most fickle fans was this: Did the Eagles, particularly in free agency, do enough to close the gap?

Philadelphia lost two of its starting linebackers, Jeremiah Trotter and Mike Caldwell, in free agency. The departure of Trotter, voted two consecutive seasons by his teammates as the Eagles' defensive most valuable player, elicited plenty of controversy. Philadelphia opted not to tender a qualifying offer to starting strong safety Damon Moore, who sustained an anterior cruciate ligament injury in the conference title game.

There were two more devastating offseason injuries: Second-year tailback Correll Buckhalter, expected to challenge Duce Staley for the starting job, blew out his knee in minicamp and is gone for the year. Defensive tackle Hollis Thomas broke his foot in camp two weeks ago, and the team's best lineman versus the run won't be back until December, if then.

	“	I'm here for one reason, and I think it fits in pretty well with what the guys who have been here for a while are all about, really. ... I could have gone somewhere else, even retired, but I felt like I could help this team take that last step. And that this team could help me take that last step, too. ”
		— S Blaine Bishop, on trying to win the Super Bowl

But even with the personnel losses, and despite having the NFL's biggest salary-cap stash, the Eagles spent judiciously on replacements. For a team that plans to quickly advance to its supposed destiny, there were no quick fixes with long-term contracts for suspect veterans. The vocal fans here have publicly voiced disapproval over what some feel are just stop-gap measures.

Yet with replacements like middle linebacker Levon Kirkland, tailback Dorsey Levens and strong safety Blaine Bishop, the Eagles have added three players with prior Super Bowl experience.

"I'm here for one reason, and I think it fits in pretty well with what the guys who have been here for a while are all about, really," Bishop said. "I went to the Super Bowl (with the Tennessee Titans in 1999) and lost. I know what it feels like, just as most of these guys know, and I want another shot. That's the only reason I'm here. I could have gone somewhere else, even retired, but I felt like I could help this team take that last step. And that this team could help me take that last step, too."

Whether the Eagles are of Super Bowl timber probably will depend on the continued progress of the offense, where head coach Andy Reid believes his unheralded and oft-criticized wide receiver corps has matured, and how well ever-aggressive defensive coordinator Jim Johnson deals with the possibility of having five new starters.

Johnson is among the NFL's premier coordinators, even if few fans outside of Philadelphia know of his work, and his intricate schemes are not easily or immediately assimilated. Johnson blitzes from exotic angles, with unusual combinations, and in the 2001 regular-season opener totally flummoxed St. Louis quarterback Kurt Warner by sending both Taylor and Troy Vincent on simultaneous "cornerback fire" maneuvers.

But the tradeoff for his Chinese Fire Drill style of mayhem is that offenses usually have a "hot" receiver open, and the Philadelphia defense must rotate properly to compensate. Bishop acknowledged that the scheme is easily the most complex he has ever played. Standout defensive tackle Corey Simon, whose 17 sacks in his first two seasons have been topped by only three other tackles in league history, allowed there is some wariness about melding five new starters into such an obtuse blueprint.

"We'll get there but, to me, we're not there yet," Simon said. "I'm not at all satisfied at this point. But I'm also confident we'll make it work. These are all veteran guys. They'll pick it up. But it just goes to show you that every season, you start all over again, you know?"

That is a mindset embraced by Reid, the only man more highly regarded in the locker room than McNabb, and a pragmatist who knows that the 2001 campaign is basically ancient history now. A self-proclaimed "simple guy," Reid has hammered home the point to his team that they can't begin the '02 season back in St. Louis, at halftime, poised to replay the second half of the NFC championship game.

The slate, as Reid emphasized on Monday, is wiped clean again. Everyone starts again from square one. His team, as motivated as it now is, cannot complete the unfinished business of 2001 unless it takes care of business from the outset of the 2002 season.

Fortunately for Reid and the Eagles, it is a message that has taken hold, particularly with the veterans eager for redemption.

"To get to the top of the ladder," said Staley, "you've got to take it one step at a time. The fact is, you can't skip any rungs, or you fall all the way back down. We intend to hit every rung this year. Including the top one."

Len Pasquarelli is a senior NFL writer for ESPN.com.