Philly sports is in rarefied air. A memorable 1980 photo reminds us how special and fleeting it can be.

Pete Peeters strapped on his goalie equipment and pulled on his Flyers jersey before waiting at the top of the Art Museum steps for the other players to arrive. The Philadelphia sports scene was humming as all four teams played for the championship in a 10-month span, and Life magazine — then one of the country’s powerhouse publications — was in town to capture it.

Joe Kadlec, the Flyers’ publicity director, came to Peeters in a hurry hours earlier when another player dropped out of the photo shoot.

“With teams like these who needs Brotherly Love?”

Julius Erving, Tug McGraw, and Ron Jaworski were meeting at the steps later that November day in 1980 for a portrait to be published the next month in Life’s year-end issue. The Flyers, who lost the Stanley Cup Final earlier in the year, needed someone to stand with them. So Peeters stuffed his pads into a bag and hitched a ride with Kadlec.

“All of these guys started arriving and I’m like, ‘What am I doing here?’” said Peeters, who helped the Flyers play 35-straight games without a loss in the 1979-1980 season. “I still look at it today and I think the same thing, ‘What the heck am I doing among those three great athletes?’ It was pretty special. I was in awe, let’s put it that way.”

The Flyers, Sixers, and Eagles were all in first place that day when Gregory Heisler — one of Life’s premier photographers — asked the stars to smile in full uniform with the Benjamin Franklin Parkway behind them. The Phillies won their first World Series weeks earlier, and McGraw, just like he did after recording the final out, raised his arms as the camera flashed. The backdrop was the skyline, still topped by William Penn.

A month after publication, the Eagles reached the Super Bowl and Philadelphia became the first city to send four teams to the championship in the same season. The 76ers and Flyers finished runners-up in May 1980, the Phillies won it all in October, and the Eagles lost the Super Bowl in January 1981.

The city’s sports landscape had never been stronger, but the four teams would not stay on top forever. The photograph is a reminder of how special Philadelphia’s sports scene is right now — the Phillies, Eagles, and Union played for the championship in a 99-day span — and how fleeting it all can be.

“It just typifies how hard it is to win a championship,” Jaworski said. “All four teams were in it and hey, we have one of the four. It’s just hard. Success is not a given. A championship is not a given.”

Jaworski arrived in Philly three years earlier and moved into a development in Voorhees, where it seemed every Philly athlete lived. Doug Collins was his next-door neighbor, Garry Maddox and Mike Schmidt lived around the corner, and Dave Schultz was nearby.

“We’d regularly meet at a bar on a Friday night and have a drink,” Jaworski said. “It was kind of a different time where you could have a friendship and get away from the craziness of the game.”

So Jaworski wasn’t just posing with other athletes that night on the Art Museum steps; he was standing with his buddies. He had season tickets to the Sixers, went to Flyers games, and shared a stadium with the Phils. The players, Jaworski said, all supported one another.

Peeters was at the Vet with his wife when the Phillies won the World Series and was back again three months later when the Eagles steamrolled Dallas to punch their ticket to Super Bowl XV. He still remembers barefooted kicker Tony Franklin and how he marveled at the size of the Eagles lineman who stopped one night by the Flyers’ dressing room. Peeters grew up in Edmonton and didn’t know much about basketball. A pair of courtside seats at the Spectrum provided everything he needed to know.

“I just couldn’t believe the speed and the size,” Peeters said. “I had no idea it was that physical under the basket. That really drew me to basketball. Unless you’re down on the floor, you don’t see that stuff. Just being this young fella, so green and not knowing anything, I sure enjoyed all of the Philadelphia sports and the city and the culture and the history. We were very fortunate to do what we did there.”

Dick Vermeil ended his final team meeting before the Super Bowl by telling the Eagles that they’d return to the same room the next night as world champions. The Birds had won 32 of their 48 games over the previous three years, advancing deeper in the playoffs each season. A Super Bowl ring seemed to be next.

“We believed it,” Jaworski said. “We were confident. Not cocky but confident that we were going to be Super Bowl champions. It didn’t happen. As disappointed as we were after that game, there was a certain confidence that we had because we were a young team.

“We were thinking, ‘Hey, we’re pretty damn good. We’re hurting now, but we’re going to be back.’ We never got back.”

The Eagles won 10 games the next season, lost in the first round, and then finished in either fourth or fifth place for the next six seasons while averaging just 5.5 wins. The Flyers lost in 1981′s first round and reached the Stanley Cup Final twice more in the 1980s but couldn’t recapture the magic of the 1970s Broad Street Bullies.

The Phillies reached the World Series in 1983 thanks to a September run from the Wheeze Kids before missing the playoffs nine years in a row. The Sixers finally won it all in 1983, then took nearly 20 years to reach the NBA Finals again. The magic felt on the Art Museum steps did not last long.

“I look back at it now and I understand what we did. But back then, I didn’t understand it at all. I was too young,” said Peeters, who was just 22 in 1980 and went on to play 13 seasons in the NHL. “People who come in at a young age, it’s so much of a learning experience. You keep getting reminded by guys like Bobby Clarke, and Paul Holmgren, and Mel Bridgman, and all the guys I played with. They try to explain it to you. But speaking for myself and not anybody else, you’re young.

“I find that when I was really young, I didn’t understand it. Even though they’re telling me and working hard wasn’t the problem, I was working hard. But then when you get a kick at the cat in the sense of getting a chance to win a championship, and you say, ‘Well this is easy.’ No, it’s not that easy. You try to repeat it again and then the older you get, you realize that some of the chances you had, it’s not that you weren’t trying hard, but things have to fall in place to be successful like that.”

It’s easy to feel optimistic about the current scene after three teams reached the final stage. Even Dr. J said he’s reminded of 1980, and Bryce Harper posted last year on Instagram that he’d love to re-create the photo.

The Sixers finished this month with the Eastern Conference’s third-best record in the first half and should begin the postseason in April as title contenders. The Phillies added Trea Turner — one of baseball’s best players — to a lineup that fell two wins short of a championship.

The NFC champion Eagles should return most of their starters and seem to have finally found their franchise quarterback. The Union started the season as the odds-on favorite to repeat as Eastern Conference champions and have built one of MLS’s best academy systems. The Flyers are on their way to their second-straight losing season — something they have not done in nearly 30 years — and seem to lack a clear direction, but there are some players you can dream on.

» READ MORE: Don’t let the Eagles’ Super Bowl loss fester, like previous Philadelphia disappointments

If the Sixers reach the Finals, Philadelphia will have four teams play for a championship in an eight month-span. The only thing Philly is missing is a portrait in Life magazine, which stopped printing in 2000, and a championship.

“It came off absolutely great,” Kadlec said of the photo. “One of our all-time great pictures of Philadelphia. An awesome photo.”

Heisler has captured portraits of Bruce Springsteen, Bill Clinton, U2, and Michael Phelps. But his night in Philadelphia was still memorable. He was 26 years old, just starting a prolific career behind the lens.

“It’s a million years ago now and I was a baby, but everyone was really psyched for it,” said Heisler, who now teaches at Syracuse. “You can see it. You meet these people all the time. Sometimes they’re in a good mood, sometimes not. I think everyone was super up for it because of what it was. It wasn’t Sports Illustrated, it wasn’t the regular thing. They were like, ‘Oh, Life. This is kind of cool.’ It was a different idea and everyone was really into it.”

For the athletes, the photo in Life meant something. The full-page portrait accompanied by a short caption instead of an article captured a special but fleeting time. Jaworski hung the portrait on his office wall while he worked at NFL Films.

“Pete Peeters was kind of the surprise guy in that photo,” Jaworski said. “A lot of people think it was Bernie Parent, but Pete Peeters had a hell of a year that year with the Flyers and that’s why he was in the photo.”

Peeters has a copy framed in his home in Canada. For the guy in the goalie pads, it’s impossible to not remember the time he hitched a ride to the Art Museum and the high a city was on.

“It’s like it happened yesterday,” Peeters said. “It’s one of those events in your life that are so special. To be involved in it is just insane. You’re thinking ‘Why me?’ God must’ve been watching over me that day. He said, ‘OK, Pete, you get to hang with these guys for an hour.’

“Those moments of winning are to be cherished because it might never happen. It doesn’t matter what walk of life you’re in, there’s always sacrifices, and even though you make them, sometimes your dreams don’t come true. But it doesn’t belittle who you are or what you’ve accomplished.”