McCaffery: On a day for the fans, Eagles scored another victory

PHILADELPHIA >> The only Super Bowl championship parade ever to crowd South Philly was about to spin out of the Linc and onto Broad Street. For the affair, Shaun Young would wear a practice-used, authentic, military-style Brandon Graham No. 55 jersey. He would not decorate his face in green and silver, a look that for so many years he’d made famous. He would, however, be in his usual character.

“Believe me,” Young said, just before the start of the Eagles’ championship celebration. “They’ll hear me.”

Wouldn’t be the first time.

Young is the Glen Mills resident and the Springfield Township streets department veteran. And he’s one Eagles fan who was standing out long before he’d be joined by 2,999,999 others to celebrate a world championship Thursday. That would have been him, for years, in shoulder pads and in a rage, screaming at Eagles games from a front-row, upper-deck perch. That would have been him, directly on camera on international TV, famously roaring in disapproval when the Eagles drafted Donovan McNabb and passed on Ricky Williams. That would have been him using that image and that platform to spread motivational, positive, helpful messages to school children in Delaware County and beyond. That would be him representing the Eagles in the Pro Football Ultimate Fan Association’s Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio.

Last Sunday, the Eagles had their day, in Minneapolis, in a 41-33 victory over the New England Patriots. Thursday belonged to the fans, millions of them cramming Broad Street and the Parkway. For that, of course, there would be Young, arriving at 6:45 for an 11 a.m. parade, camped right there at its start.

“The players are going to enjoy it, the organization is going to enjoy it, but there is no doubt, it is the city that deserves this thing,” said Young, his left hand decorated with his Fans’ Hall of Fame ring. “We are so proud of this team. We’re so proud of this city. We’re going to enjoy it through and through, all day long, and for weeks and months.”

The parade was glorious, covered in sunshine at the beginning and fireworks at the end, with the Eagles again successfully running every clever play. It moved at an appropriate pace, not too fast for anyone to miss a selfie opportunity, but not too slow to inconvenience viewers farther along on the route. Jeffrey Lurie, who was a movie producer long before he trafficked in green energy and championship football, was the first to figure out that Philadelphia championship parades should end at, not start near, the Rocky steps. It worked, all of it. And one reason it worked was because the Eagles, at long last, understood it all. That much was clear when, just as the parade busted a right onto South Broad, Doug Pederson jumped out of a double-decker-bus float and walked the Lombardi Trophy over to fans lining the streets. Along the way, various players did the same, exiting their vehicles, not too self-important to mingle. Jason Kelce even wore a Mummer’s costume. Green, of course. Game over. Eagles parade wins.

“I knew that this was a special place,” Carson Wentz said, into the microphone at the Art Museum. “But these are some seriously special fans.”

They are. They always have been, even if the Eagles recently would go through 17 years of head coaches big-timing them. They were Thursday, when they were well behaved almost to the point of being polite, at least early on the parade route. It was as if they were so determined to watch what was happening before them that they didn’t have time to think about disrupting it. No exaggeration: There were more E-A-G-L-E-S chants at the Sixers game the other night than when the parade slipped past the Wells Fargo Center Thursday.

“I have never seen,” Nick Foles said, “so much unity in celebration in my life.”

The fans, who had supported the Eagles through some horrifying hours and unexplainable disappointments, deserved that moment. And were they to be rolled into one, they would have looked like Shaun Young, who was known to be grumpy and happy and loud and angry and thoughtful and decent and religiously patient through a championship vigil that took too long.

The Eagles won the championship for the fans. But in some ways, the fans helped win the championship for the Eagles.

“The players had to do what they had to do on the field,” Young said. “But I can’t help but feel they feed off the fans. When that place is lit up the way it is at the Linc, with all of that noise, and when we make a big play, it makes a difference. And that’s saying something.”

The fans made plenty of noise for years, and not always in a “We Are the Champions” sing-along. The Eagles heard it, all of it, the sour and the supportive. They heard it Thursday, too. One Hall of Fame fan and a few million like him made sure of that.