Philly could be in for a fun rookie ride with Quinyon Mitchell, Jared McCain, and Matvei Michkov

The best thing about being a sports fan isn’t when your favorite team wins a championship. It isn’t the destination. It’s the ride. It’s the daily pleasure that you derive from following a terrific baseball team throughout the summer. It’s the anticipation of a big-time NFL game and the satisfaction you feel for the next 48 hours after your team has won it. It’s the wonder and joy that fills your heart as you watch a team that had been rebuilding — or simply has been flat-out terrible — transform itself into a contender. The buzz from a championship parade fades. The ride sustains. The ride is the good stuff.

Then there’s the ride within the ride. There’s the chance to witness prospects develop into players, to see young talent improve and blossom over time. Through that process, a strong connection forms between those athletes and their local fan bases. The 2008 Phillies are beloved; any team that ended a city’s 25-year major pro championship drought would be. But they’re revered because of their core: Jimmy Rollins, Chase Utley, Ryan Howard, Cole Hamels, Carlos Ruiz, Ryan Madson, Brett Myers. All of them had been in the Phillies’ organization from the start of their careers, and people felt like they had watched those guys grow up.

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Take a look, then, at the Eagles, the 76ers, and the Flyers in that context. Their seasons wouldn’t seem to have much in common at first glance. The Eagles are 9-2 and at worst the second-best team in the NFC, behind the Detroit Lions. The Sixers are 3-14 and approaching the point at which it would be more beneficial for them to keep losing games — and secure the highest possible draft pick — than to try to push for a playoff berth. And the Flyers are somewhere in between them: in fifth place in the eight-team Metropolitan Division.

There is a thread binding them, though: Each has a rookie or rookies who are promising to be excellent, if not great, for a very long time. Quinyon Mitchell and Cooper DeJean have made the entire Eagles defense better for their presence this season. Jared McCain has been the most pleasant surprise — hell, the only pleasant surprise — of this godawful Sixers season. And with every game that he plays, every moment that the puck is on his stick, Matvei Michkov makes it clear why the Flyers, knowing that he might never suit up for them, took the risk of drafting him anyway.

Mitchell, McCain, and Michkov have been so good, in fact, that each of them could win his respective league’s Rookie of the Year award, which would be a unique development in Philadelphia sports. Three Rookies of the Year in the same year? As Jerry Seinfeld would say, there’s no precedent, baby, though it has come relatively close to happening before.

For example …

— Allen Iverson and Scott Rolen both were ROYs in 1997, but neither the Eagles nor the Flyers had a worthy candidate.

— In 1973, United Press International picked Eagles tight end Charle Young as its rookie of the year, and for good reason. Young was an All-Pro, catching 55 passes for 854 yards and six touchdowns. The Flyers’ Bill Barber finished second in the Calder Trophy voting behind the New York Rangers’ Steve Vickers, and Phillies catcher Bob Boone tied for third in the National League ROY voting.

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— Then there was 1984. Dave Poulin had a terrific first season for the Flyers, with 31 goals and 76 points. But he was a distant fourth in balloting for the Calder Trophy, trailing three teenagers: goaltender Tom Barrasso and high-scoring forwards Steve Yzerman and Sylvain Turgeon. Juan Samuel put together as dynamic an offensive season as any Phillies rookie had in years: a .272 batting average, 36 doubles, 19 triples, 15 home runs, and 72 stolen bases. Yet you could hardly blame voters for putting him behind that year’s NL ROY: the Mets’ Dwight Gooden.

The Eagles did have a Rookie of the Year in ‘84, however. UPI honored their placekicker, Paul McFadden, who led the NFL with 30 field goals and is probably best remembered as a member of that quirky fraternity of the Eighties: barefooted kickers. Rich Karlis, Tony Franklin (another former Eagle), McFadden — it was a time of toe-jam football.

Of course, Mitchell, McCain, and Michkov are likely to have a bit more staying power and positive influence on their teams than McFadden did. He spent just four seasons with the Eagles, who bid him farewell after he missed 10 of his 26 field-goal attempts during the strike-shortened 1987 season. The ride within the ride can last only so long when a guy won’t put on his other shoe.