* Starting tight end Jordan Reed?

“The best receiving tight end in the league,” Niles Paul said.

* The receivers as a group?

“We think that, you know, we’re the best in the league,” Jamison Crowder said.

* Left tackle Trent Williams?

“You’re talking about the top left tackle in the NFL,” Morgan Moses said.

* The right side of the offensive line?

“I definitely think that right side is going to emerge as one of the best right sides in this league in the next couple years,” Williams said.

AD

* The running game?

” I definitely see us reemerging as one of the top five rushing teams in the league,” Williams said.

AD

The offense?

“I think we can definitely be a top-five offense in this league,” DeSean Jackson said.

* The defense?

“I can really see us being a top 10 defense in this league,” Chris Baker said.

* The defensive line?

“We’re a bunch of underdogs on the defensive line,” Baker said. “But I can tell you one thing: We’re going to go out and compete and be one of the top lines in this league.”

Just go ahead and call ’em the Lake Wobegon Redskins: The offense is strong, the defense is good-looking, and all the position groups are way above average. Although you’ll notice that there’s been no mention yet of the special teams. That’s why I sort-of jokingly asked long snapper Nick Sundberg whether he could fill that void.

AD

“On paper, we have the ability to be one of the best coverage units in the league, absolutely,” he said. “You look across the board, and you’re like, ‘Holy crap, we’ve got some talent on the field.’ … Every year guys are like ‘Yeah, we’re good, we’ll be all right.’ This year it’s like, ‘Welllll, we might be a little better than all right.’”

AD

Such optimism made me feel a bit woozy during the few days I spent in Richmond. Luckily, if anything went wrong, I was almost certainly surrounded by the best medical staff in the league. Plus, I’m hearing that the team’s stretcher bearers are in the best shape of their lives.

I don’t mean to be cynical. It’s just that the Redskins have long specialized in eras of good feelings, which commence sometime in late July and continue until sometime in mid-September. I’ll never forget a conversation I had with third-string quarterback Kellen Clemens in the summer of 2011, when he half-convinced me that the Grossman-and-Beck Redskins were going to shock the world.

AD

“You can feel it,” he told me. “You can feel it with the guys in the room. You can feel it at meetings, practice, the way the guys work, the way the guys care for one another. Yeah, I think everybody believes that there’s something special with this group of guys.”

AD

They finished 5-11. Which, incidentally, is Washington’s most common record over the last 13 years.

That’s why last summer’s lemonade-stand-in-a-wind-tunnel of a preseason — with its oddly diagnosed concussions and quarterback swaps and universal ridicule — felt almost liberating. There was no hype then. Boasting of being the best at anything would have invited scorn. For years, the Redskins had promised Pineapple and Pearls but delivered Founding Farmers. A year ago, they had comfortably accepted life as a neighborhood dive: The burgers might not have been Wagyu, but you would at least get what you were promised.

AD

“You know what? We’re not gonna be the best team out there this year,” GM Scot McCloughan said last August, in one of the realest quotes the Redskins had delivered in decades.

Except then the season somersaulted. The Redskins won their division; the roster was dotted with young stars; and the era of low expectations shuddered to a stop after less than 12 months. The 2015 season was supposed to initiate a new era of world-weary patience and steady growth. The 2016 season?

AD

“There is no reason this year we shouldn’t go all the way,” Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe said Friday.

No reason? How about this: The Redskins haven’t won nine games in back-to-back seasons since 1992. The NFC East hasn’t had a repeat champion in more than a decade. Washington won a division last year in which only one team won even half its games; that hadn’t happened in the NFC East since 2004.

AD

“Absolutely we were lucky last year,” Hall said this week during an appearance on ESPN. “We were a product of a bad division. I’ve never been one to hide that fact. We were in the playoffs because we were in a terrible division, without a doubt.”

That feels like a wise approach. And to be fair, there are plenty of savvy old vets on this roster who’ve sounded a similar message. The general tone of camp has been, more than anything, mature. The atmosphere is as workmanlike as any I can remember.

AD

“Yeah, we’re confident, but we also understand that what we did last year doesn’t buy us anything this year,” said Kedric Golston, the team’s longest-serving player, who’s endured plenty of these premature spasms of joy. “That’s been the message from the top. Coach Gruden said it day one. Everybody [in the NFL] feels the exact same way this time of year; everybody is feeling good. And we understand the talent that we have, but we also understand that it doesn’t do anything for you.”

AD

And yet athletes — unlike writers — are conditioned to predict excellence. I expect the worst — and warn my editors to expect pure garbage — and then feel pleased if I achieve, say, sub-par mediocrity. Premature confidence opens up the possibility of mockable failure, which is why I told some players that all this best-in-the-league talk makes me jittery.

“We’re not cocky. None of us are cocky,” Ricky Jean-Francois said. “There’s a difference between confident and cocky. When we say the best, we’re that confident in ourselves. … But at any given time if you ever hear a dude say, ‘Well, I’m normal and average,’ tell ’em to walk their ass through this building and get out. Because then you don’t have no confidence in yourself.”

AD

And Williams laughed when I suggested that having a top-five rushing attack felt a bit ambitious after last season’s persistent struggles to run the ball, when the Redskins ranked 30th in yards-per-attempt.

AD

“We’re not sitting here practicing every day on the run game and run schemes to go out there and be mediocre,” Williams said.

Predictions, these players suggested, are almost like pre-game stretches: something that opens them up to their possibilities. So let’s let them have their predicted superlatives. I still think fans should temper their hopes. And I don’t mean to boast, but that’s actually the very best advice in the history of the world.