In an all-time great Super Bowl, the Eagles weren’t good enough. Oh, what could have been.

GLENDALE, Ariz. — Jeffrey and Julian Lurie stayed off to themselves in a corner of the losing team’s locker room late Sunday night, father and son representing the Eagles’ leadership and the franchise’s eventual succession plan, each with a wistful smile that betrayed a hint of sadness over a Super Bowl victory that had slipped away. Around the rest of the room, there was a low murmur of sound, of clothing shoved into duffle bags and socked feet padding across a carpeted floor, of courteous media asking questions in hushed voices and players answering in whispers.

It had been perhaps the greatest Super Bowl of all, a game full of toughness and comebacks and thrills and magic, a game with two quarterbacks — one on a bad ankle made worse when he was tackled, one with a bad shoulder that he lowered to surge his way into the end zone to tie the score — who played with so much guts and smarts and skill that neither deserved to lose, a game that will require several weeks and a federal investigative commission before anyone can begin to make sense of it.

It could have been, maybe should have been, a glorious night to end a glorious season for the Eagles. They had a rightful claim to being the best team in the NFL, and they had cruised into Super Bowl LVII on the winds of two dominant postseason performances, and with one more victory, they could call themselves the best Eagles team of all, and who would have argued with them? And there they were, with a 10-point lead at halftime, 30 minutes from their second world championship in five years, all of that history and majesty there, right there, in their hands.

And they dropped it.

The final score said that the Kansas City Chiefs beat the Eagles at State Farm Stadium, 38-35, on a 27-yard field goal by Harrison Butker with eight seconds left in regulation. Those are the coldest, most basic facts from Sunday, and the Chiefs should be credited for doing what the Eagles could not: On the biggest of stages, in the most important of situations, they did not beat themselves. They did not turn the ball over. The penalties they committed were not so costly. They kept coming and coming and coming, and the Eagles, too many times, in too many ways, failed to meet the measure of the moment.

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Jalen Hurts, as marvelous as he was, lost the football on a fumble and kicked it away, turning that mistake into a 36-yard fumble return by Chiefs linebacker Nick Bolton and a game-tying — and game-changing — touchdown in the second quarter. Andy Reid and Patrick Mahomes Bobby Fischered Jonathan Gannon and his defense for most of the night and, more importantly, throughout the second half, Mahomes throwing three touchdowns and rushing for 44 yards despite a high-ankle sprain. Their play-calling and the manner in which they carried out those plays left the Eagles so befuddled that members of the Eagles’ secondary were yelling at each other on the field in the aftermath of leaving a couple of Kansas City receivers wide open.

Kadarius Toney ripped off a 65-yard punt return to set up a Chiefs touchdown, the kind of a special-teams breakdown that the Eagles had seemed to have moved past over the last two months. And finally, in the Eagles’ last and most consequential mistake, James Bradberry grabbed JuJu Smith-Schuster for a holding penalty with 1 minute, 54 seconds to go. The infraction allowed the Chiefs to milk the game clock for an additional 106 seconds — 106 seconds that the Eagles would have had to try to drive to tie the game.

“I thought we deserved to have a chance to win the game in the final couple of minutes,” Lurie said in an oblique reference to the Bradberry penalty. That frustration was understandable. No one wants to see a call like that factor into a game’s outcome, a call that is technically correct but close enough that an official could disregard it. It was understandable, but misplaced.

This will be one that all the Eagles — Hurts, head coach Nick Sirianni, Gannon, and his defensive staff and players, all of them — will rue and regret for a time whose length one can only imagine. There will be a natural impulse, among fans and maybe even the Eagles themselves, to blame the officiating crew for some questionable calls — “It was a hold,” said Bradberry, who wasn’t one of the questioners — or the slippery stadium turf that caused players to fall and tiptoe as if they were on an icy city street. But make no mistake: The team that had been the best in the NFL was not the better one on the field Sunday night.

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“We just did uncharacteristic things, man,” defensive end Josh Sweat said. “We didn’t play together. I don’t know, man. I don’t know. We’ve got to be on the same page. Whatever we call, we’ve got to be on the same page. We can’t get out of gaps. Just stuff like that. We’ve got to get … it’s a lot of stuff. I can’t pinpoint just the little things. We made way too many mistakes.”

The Eagles’ mission was simple enough: Play a clean game, and we’ll probably win the Super Bowl. They didn’t. Not when it mattered most. Not to beat a coach as good as Reid and a quarterback as great as Mahomes.

“I don’t think this game is defined by one play, one play throughout the game, or one call, or whatever it was,” said Hurts, who threw for 304 yards and a touchdown, ran for 70 yards and three touchdowns, and could have been named the game’s most valuable player even in defeat. “I’m big on self-reflection and reflecting on the things I could have done better, so I think I’m going to challenge everyone — and I’ve already challenged everyone — to think about those things, because it’s the same process we go about. Look at yourself in the mirror and be able to learn from everything. Like I said, you either win, or you learn.”

The Eagles learned plenty while they were winning, too. They learned that Hurts is indeed a franchise quarterback, however one chooses to define that term, and that player-personnel chief Howie Roseman is capable of shepherding the team through the upheaval of losing a previous franchise quarterback and head coach. If one had said in 2018, just after the Eagles’ victory in Super Bowl LII, that they would be back in another Super Bowl five years later, the assumption would have been that Carson Wentz would be under center and Doug Pederson would be on the sideline. Instead, it was Hurts and Sirianni. It was a hell of a ride and a missed opportunity at the end.

In that somber locker room, Jeffrey Lurie was asked to sum up the season. “Great young quarterback; great coaching; Howie, awesome — everything I would have said up on the stage, basically,” he said, and he forced a laugh. He had to force it, because he had to know: This one will go down as an all-time game between two terrific teams, but it will also linger for a long time in Philadelphia, and any mention of it will be accompanied by shaking heads and might-have-beens. They had it. The Eagles had it. And they let it go.