With his incredible season, Saquon Barkley is chasing Eric Dickerson once again. He isn’t the only one.

Saquon Barkley has chased Eric Dickerson before. In December 2018, when he was in his first season with the New York Giants and not yet an MVP candidate with the Eagles, Barkley was closing in on Dickerson’s NFL rookie record for total yards from scrimmage, 2,212, and in an interview with ESPN, Dickerson left no doubt that the prospect of Barkley’s breaking his record filled him with as much disappointment as it did admiration.

“Do I want him to break it?” he said at the time. “Absolutely not. I’m going to be honest. But good luck to you.”

Barkley finished 184 yards short of Dickerson then. But his second chance to catch him, his pursuit of Dickerson’s single-season rushing record of 2,105 yards, has added a layer of intrigue to what is shaping up to be the best season any Eagles running back has ever had.

At 1,499 yards through 12 games, Barkley needs 606 more to equal the record, which Dickerson set in 1984 in his second season with the Los Angeles Rams. In fact, Monday will mark the 40th anniversary of the game in which Dickerson broke the previous record of 2,003, set by O.J. Simpson in 1973.

On his 27th and final carry during a 27-16 victory over the Houston Oilers, needing five yards to tie Simpson, Dickerson took a pitch from quarterback Jeff Kemp — “47-gap” in the Rams’ playbook — ripped off nine yards to finish the game with 215, and was engulfed by Kemp and the team’s offensive linemen in a circle of celebration.

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“It’s one of those moments that you don’t really appreciate at the time,” former Rams guard Dennis Harrah, a teammate of Dickerson’s for more than four years, said Wednesday night in an interview. “But as you look back on it, it’s really special. It was a great accomplishment. It’s almost like the Super Bowl.”

Dickerson certainly regards it the same way. The ninth-leading rusher in league history, inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1999, he is 64 now and remains in the public eye, but really only on his terms. He published his autobiography in 2022 and shows up from time to time on a national talk show. “If you’re waiting for Eric Dickerson to call you …” Harrah said over the phone, laughing as his voice trailed away.

On Tuesday, Dickerson was in Dallas at his alma mater, Southern Methodist University, to participate in a panel discussion about the name, image, and likeness era of college athletics. SMU’s football program, of course, received the “death penalty” from the NCAA in 1987 for paying players, Dickerson among them, and he didn’t hold back in his condemnation of the association and its actions, upheaval, and hypocrisy.

“I hate them,” he reportedly said at the event. “They, to me, are just crooks.”

Few athletes were better fits for their eras than Dickerson was for the 1980s. With his Jheri curl and goggles, he seemed the product of a gene-splicing experiment involving Michael Jackson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. In the decade of Dynasty and Dallas and Don Johnson, at a time when polish was premium, Dickerson was as stylish as a tailback could be; he ran with his shoulders back, his posture ramrod straight, his arms pumping like a pair of metronomes, every step and movement smooth and steady. The man was an elegant machine.

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“Off the field, he never seems to hurry, as if he’s afraid he might bump into something in the dark,” Jim Murray, the Los Angeles Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning sports columnist, wrote of Dickerson before the Rams’ game against the Oilers. “Even with the football, he goes along the line of scrimmage like a thief trying doors in a row of houses. When he finds one open, he’s gone. He doesn’t run as much as he glides.”

The second pick in the quarterback-heavy 1983 NFL draft — behind John Elway, ahead of Dan Marino, Jim Kelly, Ken O’Brien, Todd Blackledge, and Tony Eason — Dickerson immediately helped reverse the Rams’ fortunes. They had gone 2-7 during the strike-shortened 1982 season, but with Dickerson as the centerpiece of their offense, they went 9-7 in ‘83 and 10-6 in ‘84, qualifying for the playoffs in both years.

Barkley has restored some of the luster to the running-back position with his remarkable play for the Eagles. But back then, it was taken for granted that a team could have its quarterbacks complete fewer than 50% of their passes and throw for fewer than 2,300 yards, as Kemp and Vince Ferragamo combined to do for the Rams in ‘84, and still win lots of games behind a good offensive line and a great ballcarrier.

“We just wanted to go out and kick some ass,” Harrah said.

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In the immediate aftermath of his achievement, Dickerson did two things. He blasted the Oilers for resorting to dirty play to prevent him from reaching and surpassing the magic number of 2,003.

“Grabbing my face mask, taking cheap shots,” he told The Los Angeles Times. “I was getting ticked I told them, ‘It’s gonna be rough on y’all today.’” And he pooh-poohed the notion that, because Simpson had needed just 14 games to set the record and he had needed 15 to break it, there ought to be an asterisk next to his name in the record book: “My thing is, nobody has run for 2,000 since O.J.”

The same principle applies now. It’s a testament to Dickerson’s greatness in ‘84 that Barkley, at his current pace, would need 17 games to pass him. Who would have thought that night at Anaheim Stadium that the record, that any record, would last four decades?

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“Eric’s Jheri curl is gone,” Harrah said, “but our memories are still there.”

Funny enough, Dickerson missed a chance Thursday morning to refresh them. He was supposed to appear on WIP-FM (94.1) at 9:30 for an interview. You don’t need my cell number, he had told the producer, James Seltzer, through an intermediary. I’ll call you. He didn’t until after the show had ended. Apologetic, he joined the hosts on Friday morning.

“I’ll tell you the truth,” he told them. “No, I don’t want my record broken. Of course I don’t. But if he breaks it, he breaks it.”

Turns out Saquon Barkley wasn’t the only one trying to track Eric Dickerson down. He has five games left to find out how good his luck is.