Is It O.k. To Cheer?

Vick got help with that, a nudge that's rippled out to rework the fabric of this NFL season. Because everyone credits Vick's work ethic from last summer—extended workouts, sessions with Eagles offensive coordinator Marty Mornhinweg, extra film work—as the foundation for what came next: the McNabb trade, Vick's startlingly high level of play after taking over when Kolb went out in the season opener with a concussion, what's happening now. None of it might have occurred if Phillips hadn't been shot and Vick's probation officer, on the day after Vick's birthday, hadn't ordered him to leave Virginia and plant himself in Philadelphia.

"That was the best thing," Vick says. "I came here for myself time. I was able to get into the playbook and start studying. It was time I needed, time I wouldn't normally have spent doing that. So everything happens for a reason. It's crazy, man. It's so unreal how God works."

Has he changed? That's the question haunting Vick still. Out of a tunnel he emerged on Sunday night, wreathed in smoke for the pregame introductions, palms pressed together in the classic steepled expression of prayer. He crossed himself, heard his name called, ran onto the field in Philadelphia amid loving cheers. Was it just a show? Two days before, Vick was sitting in an office at the team complex, detailing his summer's error and shame, how he cried that one day more than his entire time in prison. "More so the reason why I feel so blessed now," he said. Was it just words?

He has heard the speculation: Mike's a free agent at the end of this season; Mike needs to say the right things; Mike's broke. He chuckled. "Mike ain't broke," he said. "But that's what people say, yeah. I don't think me saying the right thing is going to get me a new deal or contract. It's all about my play. It's all how you conduct yourself as you play well. I don't have to put on a front around anybody. Everybody knows my personality."

That's not true, of course. For strangers eyeing the few clues—a scattering of star tattoos on his neck, the Superman inking on the back of his right hand, the walk your talk! sign in his locker—and listening to his raspy voice, there's a spring-loaded air about Vick, a sense of command or laughter or fury held in check. It's not hard to visualize, when teammates speak as they did after Sunday's win, of him snapping at his offensive line, the entire offense, for leaving him exposed and dropping passes and committing penalties. "He was really angry about it," Avant said. But after Avant coughed up a pass in the end zone against the Giants, Vick also said, "I'm coming back at you. I believe in you."

Knowing when to slap and when to massage, after all, is a leader's job, and Vick's place in the Eagles' locker room, much less among his peers around the league, is unquestioned. It's striking: You'd be hard put to find many athletes, including his opponents, who aren't rooting for him to succeed, and the fact that many are black men, out of hardscrabble places touched daily by crime and the prison system, is no coincidence. It's too soon to say whether Vick's case will, like the O.J. Simpson verdict, reveal a black-white divide, but Lurie was struck by the scene: In Martha's Vineyard, after endorsing the move, Vernon Jordan then turned to the room filled with, as Lurie puts it, "well-known African-Americans" and said, "What do you guys think? Does Michael Vick deserve a chance to get back in the NFL?" The answer, Lurie says, "was like a rallying cry."

"We look up to him," Avant says, speaking for the locker room, black and white. "The Bible says, 'The righteous man falls seven times but he gets up again.' He's getting up and trying, and it's helping him and helping our team. Guys look at him not as a quarterback; we look at him as an inspiration. We look at him as a guy who has been through hell and back—and he's conquered it."

Vick won't go that far. He's no longer the kid sure he could get away with any transgression. Friends say he seems "free" for the first time, unburdened by the distractions of hangers-on and activities he couldn't resist, but there's also a liberation that comes when the worst has come and gone. The world knows all the bad things Vick has done, yet he's still alive, admired, still able to make a living and play a game he loves. But he tells himself that he's one misstep away from losing it all.

"Every day is a challenge," Vick told SI last week. "Still. Right now. And it will probably be that way next year and the year after. So nothing's going to change. That means I've got to change."

Can he stay out of trouble? The more Vick wins, the higher the stakes rise. The more fans buy in. The more cynics say it's a con. The more viewers find themselves forced to take a stand, to comb through questions about race or justice or, God knows, the mystery of human nature. "You hope," Vick says, and maybe it's just a figure of speech. But it's true. We, watching, are a part of it. The longer it continues, the better it gets, the more the Michael Vick story becomes about us.