Way before that first kick-off of the NFL season, the Rookie Story emerges. _Is he gonna start? Will he get cut? Is #Manzieling a thing?! _But what about the other set of rookies standing in the tunnel, waiting for their cue to run out onto the field? The other professional athletes who also happen to be physician assistants, speech pathologists, and pre-med majors?

The NFL cheerleader is the real-life ultimate dream girl. The Kelly Kapowskis and Ali Larter-in-Varsity-Blue-s of the world. The Sunday afternoon eye candy that, lately, isn’t taking any of the league’s alleged precedent of crazily low (sometimes illegal!) standard wages bullshit anymore. After a visit to the City of Brotherly Love and questionable sports fans; after overhearing a kid eagerly albeit skeptically ask, "Are they real cheerleaders?"; and after seeing grown, adult men revert to their dirt-toeing 12-year-old selves when they walk by, I met her—or, fourteen of her. For two days, I embedded with the largest rookie class the NFL Philadelphia Eagles cheerleaders have recruited in years. Pompoms ahead.

10-ish a.m. On a muggy mid-summer Monday in Philadelphia at Lincoln Financial Field, the Eagles home stadium, it feels like the first day of school. Inside the staff entrance known as "Stadium Control," Barbara Zaun, director of the Philadelphia Eagles Cheerleaders, walks through the ground level staff-only area waving, stopping for a hug, exchanging _good to see you!_s.

Today will be a sort of dress rehearsal for that first September game day—it’s an open training camp day for the players—and inside, the cheerleaders’ locker room seems huge. A walk from front to back takes you past a bank of lockers painted signature midnight green and a brightly lit, mirror-lined bay for primping. Matching black mesh tote bags—each with a silver ruffled skirt, that says CHEERLEADER in block capital letters on one side, a bedazzled eagle head on the other—are scattered atop the room’s countertops. In about an hour or so, when the entire cheerleading team, give or take a set of poms or two, it will seem much smaller. And tanner.

11:07 a.m. Upstairs, in a mid-level stadium concourse, a few cheerleaders are mingling with fans. (It’s Military Appreciation Day, and all sorts of uniformed servicemen and women are here to be appreciated.) On one side a three-woman USO singing troupe belt out almost-comically patriotic tunes (think: Lee Greenwood’s "Proud to Be an American") in army-themed pin-up-y getups. Six-foot-tall Swoop, the team mascot, posts up for photo-ops.

Nearby, 30-year-old Army sergeant Mark Flammer is here with his younger brother and stepdad. He’s still grinning moments after snapping a photo with a few cheerleaders. They plan to send the photo to a friend who couldn’t make it today, you know, to make him jealous. But that can’t be reason enough for the smile that’s still plastered on his face.

"It’s kind of like awe," Flammer says, of meeting the ladies.

"And they seem to have a nice personality too," says his brother.

It’s an exciting morning for the team’s rookies, too. Jess, a physics and pre-med student at West Chester University who looks like a taller, slightly less baby-faced Selena Gomez, explains nearly punctuationlessly the day so far:

"Today? It’s kind of been my favorite, really. All, our favorite. Our first like really big appearance, so it’s really exciting, I mean, everything that’s been going on is just completely exciting and we’re all just like, everything that goes on, the rookies we’re like, Oh my God, like pumped up to do this thing. People ask us sometimes what we’re looking forward to the most in the season, and it’s just like, we look forward to the next big thing in the season and then after that we’re like, Okay the next big thing! And it’s like there’s not really one thing we’re looking forward to, it’s just the entire season is just full of so many things that we’re so happy to be in and it’s still very surreal for us, so most of us still wake up and go, Oh my God, we’re an Eagles cheerleader, it’s very exciting and just unbelievable. Really unbelievable."