A City Pushed to Its Limit Is Saved

PHILADELPHIA —  No city and no team needed to win a game this weekend as much as Philly and its Eagles.

Be glad the Eagles beat the Atlanta Falcons here Sunday. Otherwise the nation’s fourth-largest metropolitan area would have been rendered useless. A loss for this overly invested fan base would have meant no streets plowed, no commuter trains operating, no financial transactions. Just a county-wide suicide watch.

Quarterback Donovan McNabb’s future as a soup seller would have been in jeopardy, unless Campbell’s planned a “Chunky: For Chokers” campaign. Not even Peyton Manning’s failures had come so often in such big games.

Coach Andy Reid would have been a lower-grade Marv Levy. (At least Pittsburgh’s Bill Cowher has one Super Bowl appearance on his resume.)

And not only does Atlanta host Super Bowls, the Falcons just went six years ago. The Eagle faithful have been waiting since 1981.

This wasn’t a franchise at a crossroads, it was a franchise at a cliff, about to be dragged into the ravine by the weight of three consecutive losses in the NFC championship game.

This 27-10 victory is for all of them, for McNabb and Reid, for the 67,717 fans foolhardy enough to sit through wind-chill factors below zero at Lincoln Financial Field on Sunday, and the millions more crazy enough to make such an emotional investment in this team.

Said wide receiver Freddie Mitchell: “For all of you waiting 20 years ... here you go.”

“Sometimes people come up and say ‘You’ve got to do this for me,’ ” Eagle defensive tackle Hollis Thomas said. “Do it for you? Yeah. “What about me? You aren’t out there on the field, crying. We’ve come up short the last few years. This is vindication. Finally.”

If it’s vindication for Thomas, Mitchell and the 18 other players who have been around for the three consecutive championship defeats, it was validation for a defense that often felt overlooked this season.

They proved themselves the hard way, catching the tiger by the tail, and keeping the dangerous Michael Vick and the rest of the Falcons’ powerful running game in check.

The Falcons led the league in rushing and rolled off 327 yards rushing in their playoff victory over the St. Louis Rams a week earlier. They couldn’t crack 100 against the Eagles on Sunday. Vick gained only 26 yards, and the Eagles sacked him four times.

The Eagles almost always had a defender in the right place to stop Vick. Sometimes he can nullify that, such as when he juked three defenders to turn a loss into a 13-yard game. For the most part, though, the Eagles hurt him -- literally -- more than he hurt them.

The Eagles sent hard messages all day, but they weren’t so macho that they became undisciplined. They held their lanes and stayed in their designated spots in the well-designed defensive approach to stopping Vick.

However, the game ball has to go to McNabb, if only because he was the goat in the past with five interceptions and only one touchdown pass in the previous three NFC championship games. This time he took responsibility for everything, including pumping up the crowd when he took the field an hour before the game.

“I think Donovan came out with the mind-set that he wasn’t going to let this happen to him again,” receiver Greg Lewis said. “I think everybody on the team bought into that, and we followed his lead.”

Reid obliged him by coaching more aggressively than he has in the past, including a fake-field-goal call and a deep pass play that McNabb threw 45 yards into the stiff wind.

McNabb completed 17 of 26 passes for 180 yards and two touchdowns and a passer rating of 111.1 (which was double what he’d averaged in the previous three NFC championships). He also ran a season-high 10 times for 32 yards.

“He can beat you with his feet or he can beat you with his arm,” Lewis said. “And today he did it with both.”

Yes, he ran, as he said he would do last week, but as he’s been so reluctant to do in recent years. He doesn’t want to be tagged as a running quarterback, the stigma that dogged many African American quarterbacks in the past.

“I got out of the pocket, so I gave some people a smile on their face to let them know I’m running it again,” McNabb said. “You just have to do whatever it takes in order to win the game.”

The hysterical fans and media were willing to do their part. The Philadelphia Inquirer even supplied a suitable-for-cutting hex sign to bring the Eagles good luck and urged fans to “will the mystical energy of the universe to go where it is most needed -- the Eagles players and coaches.”

Now that defense, McNabb and a city’s collective willpower have advanced the Eagles to their second Super Bowl, it’s just their luck to be undermanned for the big game against the superior New England Patriots. There was already conjecture about star wideout Terrell Owens returning from his ankle injury to play in the Super Bowl. But it’s possible he might not make any more contributions than he did Sunday, when he danced, flapped his arms and waved a towel on the sideline to exhort the crowd.

Meanwhile, can the team and fans gird up again after this huge collective exhale?

All of the questions will add up to another batch of frustration for the Eagle fans. At least this time, at the Super Bowl in Jacksonville, they’ll be warmer.

J.A. Adande can be reached at j.a.adande@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Adande go to j.a.adande@latimes.com.