The NFC East will be better and tougher on the Eagles. Good. It’s been lousy for too long.

The NFC East is a funny thing.

No other division’s glory days are as glorious. Books have been written about its coaches. NFL Films derived years’ worth of mythmaking programming from Bill Parcells, Lawrence Taylor, Phil Simms, Joe Gibbs, John Riggins, the Hogs, Emmitt Smith, Troy Aikman, Michael Irvin, Jimmy Johnson, Reggie White, Randall Cunningham, Buddy Ryan, and more.

Madden and Summerall just didn’t sound the same when they were doing 49ers-Rams. It was a time, man. It was a scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the mystique from that era and those rivalries lasts still in the memories of those who were there, who were part of those games, who witnessed it all.

That mystique lasted so long, in large part, because over most of the intervening years, the NFC East has pretty much stunk on ice.

The Eagles’ Super Bowl victory in 2018 is the division’s lone championship in more than a decade. The Cowboys haven’t won one in nearly 30 years. Washington hasn’t won one in more than 30 years. The Giants, entering last season, were coming off a 10-year period in which they had two winning seasons, made the playoffs once, and cycled through five head coaches.

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No team has repeated as division champion since the Eagles won their fourth straight crown in 2004, and that parity isn’t a reflection of the excellence of the NFC East, because the NFC East generally hasn’t been excellent. Instead, it’s a reflection of the division’s mediocrity or sub-mediocrity. Three times in a five-year span, from 2015 through 2020, the NFC East’s first-place team finished 9-7 or worse and was bounced from the postseason during wild-card weekend. It wasn’t quite as easy for the NFL’s propaganda machine to god up Joe Judge, Carson Wentz, and Dan Snyder.

But as Week 1 of the 2023 season draws closer, the clouds are parting and the sun is shining and … Daniel Jones has a new four-year, $160-million contract and Brian Schottenheimer is Dallas’ new offensive coordinator and Sam Howell, a fifth-round pick who has thrown 19 passes in the NFL, is the Commanders’ new starting quarterback. OK, so the NFC East isn’t all the way back.

For all the strides that the Giants made under Brian Daboll last season, for example, the Eagles outscored them by 108-45 in winning all three of the teams’ matchups, and that 38-7 waxing in the divisional round was as one-sided as a playoff game gets.

Every NFL season is its own entity, though, and it’s fair to say that, in the main, things are looking up for the division as a whole. Daboll coaxed a playoff berth and a playoff victory out of the Giants in his first season as a head coach — no small achievement given the overall talent on his roster. He’s a good coach who’ll improve over time. The Cowboys signed Stephon Gilmore and Brandin Cooks and drafted Mazi Smith; that should help. And Washington, already with a respectable defense, will be better simply for the departures of Snyder and Wentz.

All of these developments will make the Eagles’ road back to the Super Bowl a tougher go than it was in 2022. It doesn’t mean that a return trip is impossible — though it is, as we’ve said before, unlikely — and it doesn’t mean that the Eagles aren’t the best team in the division. They are. What it means is that no one should be surprised if that gap closes a little this season. The Eagles should repeat as division champs and probably will, but it’s not the same slam dunk it was a year ago.

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“Mentally, man, it’s hard to do,” Eagles tackle Lane Johnson said. “There are different ways to handle success, and for us, it’s just to maintain focus on the here and now and what’s in front of us and not get too carried away about the what-ifs. It comes down to execution, like the Eagles had in the early 2000s. Getting back to that would be nice.”

For the Eagles, sure. For the rest of us, well, no one wants to watch Quincy Carter and Danny Wuerffel play quarterback again, right?