In 2018, Justin Timberlake’s Super Bowl halftime show proved lucky for the Birds. Don’t let us down, Kendrick Lamar and SZA.

When the Eagles suit up to play the Kansas City Chiefs at the Superdome in New Orleans on Sunday, it will be their fifth time competing in the biggest game in American sports.

It will also be the fifth Super Bowl halftime show staged during a Birds battle for the Vince Lombardi Trophy. And over the 44-year span since the team’s initial appearance, the extravaganza has grown into an unrivaled spectacle that allows superstar acts to reach the largest possible audience.

How many eyes will be on Kendrick Lamar and SZA on Sunday? A lot. Last year’s Super Bowl, when Usher busted moves as the mid-game entertainment, was the most watched telecast — of any kind — in history, with 123.4 million viewers in the U.S. across all platforms, according to Nielsen Media Data, with another estimated 62.5 million estimated outside the U.S.

That dwarfs the number who tune in to the Grammy Awards, where Lamar’s five wins — all for his celebrated Drake diss track “Not Like Us” — were the most by any artist last Sunday. The Grammys are marketed as “Music’s biggest night” but the 15.4 million who watched the Grammys on Sunday — down 9% from last year — is one-eighth the size of the Super Bowl audience.

It wasn’t always this way. The first time the Eagles made it to represent the NFC in the championship game was in 1981. That game was also in New Orleans — and if we’re dividing Super Bowl halftime shows into Taylor Swift-style Eras, it was in a premodern age when the NFL hadn’t yet figured out that pop music + sports = an explosive marketing equation.

For that first Eagles appearance — a 27-10 loss to the Oakland Raiders — the halftime entertainment featured the Southern University Marching Band and 1940s big band singer Helen O’Connell. In that Era, you were lucky to get a marching band, and be spared Up with People, the relentlessly cheerful singing troupe that was then a Super Bowl fixture. Ella Fitzgerald and Chubby Checker appeared over the game’s first two decades, but it wasn’t until the 1990s, when first Gloria Estefan and then Michael Jackson raised the halftime show’s profile.

With the Eagles shut out that decade, repping Philly was left to Patti LaBelle and Teddy Pendergrass, who performed in 1995, and Boyz II Men, who sang in 1998. And by the time the Birds returned to the Super Bowl in 2005, another Era in the evolution of the halftime show had begun.

The year before was the most infamous halftime show of all time, marked not only by the wardrobe malfunction incident in which Justin Timberlake tore Janet Jackson’s top (and seemed to suffer no consequences), but also performances by the notorious trio of Kid Rock, P. Diddy, and Jessica Simpson.

So when the Eagles faced Tom Brady in 2005, the NFL needed a controversy-free alternative. Bring on the cute Beatle: Paul McCartney played three Fab Four Beatles songs plus “Live And Let Die” and was a bright spot on a dark day, as the Eagles lost 24-21.

Timberlake got another crack at the world’s biggest gig when the Eagles finally got back to the game in 2018. The middling show is most remembered for a duet with a projected image of Prince on “I Would Die 4 U.” The result was a Philly special: a 41-33 Eagles victory.

The Birds’ games against the Chiefs in 2023 and this year’s rematch are part of a new stage in Super Bowl halftime showbiz: the Jay-Z Era.

In 2020, the Roc Nation mahoff partnered with the NFL, a year after Maroon 5 headlined the halftime show in Atlanta. Since then, halftime has been a showcase for R&B, hip-hop, and Latin pop acts from Shakira, Jennifer Lopez, and Bad Bunny in 2020 to the Dr. Dre-Snoop West Coast hip-hop party Lamar was a part of in 2022.

When Rihanna played Eagles-Chiefs 1.0 in 2023, the result was disappointing for the Birds, a 38-35 Chiefs victory. But the Barbadian pop star and business magnate’s performance (with Philadelphia bassist Adam Blackstone as bandleader) was first-rate, by emphasizing musicality over athletic staging, a wise move considering she was pregnant at the time.

Which brings us back to Lamar, whose Super Bowl LIX performance with SZA will offer a preview of their “Grand National Tour,” which comes to Lincoln Financial Field on May 5.

Like Rihanna, Lamar is perceived as the rare artist of integrity of such an elevated stature — he won the Pulitzer Prize, for goodness' sake — that the Super Bowl needs him more than he needs the Super Bowl. And while Lamar had decisively done away with Drake in their rap battle with “Not Like Us” months prior to being named the headliner in September, the NFL couldn’t have hoped for better timing than having K.Dot headline a week after his Grammy sweep.

Lamar’s 2022 “The Big Steppers Tour" stop in Philly showed him to have become a master of the craft of entertaining an arena-size crowd without watering down the essential seriousness of his art in the slightest.

On Sunday, Lamar will have 12 or 13 minutes to captivate a global audience, which he’s entirely capable of doing on his own. Still, he’s expected to bring on surprise guests, shining a light not only on TDE labelmate SZA — a major star who’s nearly Super Bowl-sized in her own right — but other artists as well.

Could Taylor Swift be one? She’ll be in the building watching her boyfriend play her hometown team. And Swift and Lamar do have a history: he was featured on a remix of “Bad Blood,” a single from her 2014 album 1989. It’s unlikely, however, that Swift would risk losing her focus on Travis Kelce’s team’s three-peat quest to upstage Lamar. NFL betting partner FanDuel rates it a long shot at +750 odds, meaning $10 will win you $75.

(Prop bets on the halftime show and other surrounding activities have become an industry unto themselves. Most amusing: How long will Jon Batiste hold the final note at the end of “The Star-Spangled Banner”? The over/under is 3.5 seconds.)

But back to speculation about the halftime show, which Eagles fans will hopefully be watching with limited anxiety after a dominant first two quarters.

The list of likely guests starts with Lamar’s nephew Baby Keem, whom he has toured with and teamed with on 2021’s “Family Ties.” Not to mention Metro Boomin and Future, with whom he topped the charts on “Like That” last year.

But an even more likely duet partner is Lil Wayne, the New Orleans rapper who headlined the Roots Picnic last year and will be joined by the Roots at the New Orleans Jazz Fest this spring. Wayne has let it be known how disappointed he was to not get the hometown Super Bowl gig, and Lamar added to the tension with “Wacced Out Murals,” on his new GNX album, which references the rift.

The two are said to have resolved their differences since, but it would be a classy move by Lamar to big up Wayne while in the Big Easy. If I were a betting fan, I’d put dollars to doughnuts on that duet happening.

But since it’s New Orleans, I should say dollars to beignets.