PHILADELPHIA — Travis Long was a few minutes from making the Eagles as the fourth quarter of the final preseason game ticked away. He signed with the Birds in 2013 as an undrafted free agent, spent a season on the practice squad while recovering from an injury that cut his college career short, and then impressed everyone during training camp in 2014.

Long was set to make the team, which Brandon Graham believed meant the Eagles were going to cut him. A first-round pick in 2010, Graham struggled through his first few seasons and didn’t seem like a fit for the new defensive scheme installed under Chip Kelly. The player who would make one of the most iconic plays in franchise history thought his days in Philly were numbered once that final preseason game ended in August 2014.

“Chip was going to let me go at one point, because he liked another guy, Travis Long, over me,” Graham told Pro Football Focus in 2016.

Then Long planted his leg and felt his knee pop with 11 minutes left as he sacked Jets quarterback Tajh Boyd. An MRI the next day said Long tore his anterior cruciate ligament, the same injury the linebacker suffered in his second-to-last game at Washington State. His season was over. Graham — who retired Tuesday as the franchise’s all-time leader in games played — was safe.

“Chip told me, ‘We had you on the roster. Know that you put in the work to get on the roster,’ ” Long said. “I was going to make the roster. I was going to be doing what I wanted to do. I was going to play on Sundays. That was always the goal. It wasn’t just to be on the team. It was to play on Sundays. Being so close, days away from making that opening day roster, and then essentially having that yanked away from you. It was hard.”

Why did this happen?

Long, 31, spent parts of four seasons with the Eagles but retired in 2016 without ever playing in an NFL regular-season game. The guy who Graham thought was going to replace him was on his couch in Spokane, Wash., when Graham knocked the football away from Tom Brady in Super Bowl LII. Long was happy for the guy he once played with. But it still stung. The disappointment was fresh.

“I would wake up thinking, ‘Why did this happen?’ ” Long said. “For so many years, I hated talking about football and my experience.”

He tried to return in 2015 but suffered another ACL injury — his third in three years — early in training camp. Long, refusing to walk away, returned again in 2016 with a bulky knee brace. Graham was by then a star and Kelly was replaced by Doug Pederson. Long didn’t fit into the new scheme and could not move the way he used to.

It took Long hours after every practice just to get his knee ready for the next day. He lost track of how often he had fluid drained from his knees. The Eagles released him early in training camp. Long retired at 23 instead of entertaining offers from other teams.

“At that point, I was just so mentally drained,” Long said.

Long stayed in Philly for a few months and returned to Spokane after his wife finished her graduate program at Villanova. It was time to leave football behind. Long said he never tied his identity to the sport. Football was just something he was good at, not something that defined him. But moving on was a challenge.

“It’s something you’ve done your entire life,” Long said. “I’ve played football since I was in the fifth grade and super competitively since high school. It was such a big part of my life.”

The Longs married in 2015 and have three children. He works in insurance sales and coached junior varsity basketball for six years at his old high school, where his wife — also a graduate of Gonzaga Prep — is a school counselor.

The first few years without football were hard, but Long eventually changed his outlook. Life is good. He even learned to look back fondly at his NFL days.

“Looking at it now, so many people never even sniff this opportunity,” Long said. “They never even get a chance. So as a full adult now and removed from it, I can look back on it with some pride and sense of accomplishment. It was hard to do that when I was fresh out and not part of a team anymore.

“I have certain memories of that rookie year where I’m competing with Jason Peters where I hit him with a good move once and I was like, ‘OK. I can compete at this level. This dude is one of the best tackles ever.’ I just wanted to prove that.”

A player Philly would love

Graham retired Tuesday morning by throwing his cleats over the Rocky statue as if it was a telephone wire. He teared up shortly after during a news conference and remembered the times “they called me a bust.” He was flanked by Super Bowl trophies in a send-off fit for a franchise legend, a player who thought he was finished 11 years ago.

“I don’t think he was going to get released for me,” Long said. “I think there were other moves that were going to be made to open up a space for me. But that’s just my opinion.”

The same Graham who was celebrated this week in Philly for being jovial, friendly, hardworking and personable was the guy Long shared a locker room with. They were competing for jobs but it never felt like that. Veterans like Graham, Connor Barwin and Trent Cole took the undrafted rookie in right away.

“I think BG has been the same from his first day to his last day,” Long said. “He was always an outstanding teammate and a great person. In an NFL locker room, obviously there’s competition. You have people trying to steal your job. Us being in the same room, yes there was competition. But he never treated me any differently. We were friends and teammates.”

Graham is beloved in Philadelphia for rallying back from a disappointing start to become an all-time great. The kid from Detroit proved perfect for Philadelphia, where he spent all 15 years of his career. Perhaps Long could have fit too. He felt overlooked in high school, played with an edge in college, and was primed to be drafted until he suffered his first ACL injury in November of 2012.

Undeterred, Long kept pushing and was set to make the NFL as an undrafted free agent, the type of guy Philly would love.

“A gritty underdog,” Long said. “I’ve always had a chip on my shoulder when it came to football. I always felt like I had something to prove, which kind of fits the whole vibe of Philly. I like to prove people wrong. I wasn’t the most physically gifted person. I wasn’t the biggest, strongest, or fastest. But I was smart and knew where I had to be. I wanted to prove that to people.”

The Super Bowl against the Patriots was bittersweet, but Long cheered when his old teammate strip-sacked Brady. He marveled this year when Graham returned for the Super Bowl just months after tearing his triceps muscle. Long watched from home again as his old team won another Super Bowl. He sent Graham a text message that night, congratulating his old teammate. Graham — the guy who thought he was getting cut for Long — texted back right away.

“That speaks to his character,” Long said. “Even if he did feel like that was the situation, he never treated me negatively because of that.”

The end of Long’s career was difficult. But it may have allowed another career — one of the all-time greats in Philly sports — to take off. A decade later, Long is OK with it.

“It’s amazing that BG had the success that he ended up having,” Long said. “The front office stuck with him and believed in him. It all worked out the way it probably should have, honestly. He was picked in the first round for a reason. He stayed consistent with who he was and how he approached things. He didn’t stop believing in himself.”

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