Simply stated, fans and pundits alike believe the Eagles have now taken flight. Star striker and team captain Robert Lewandowski’s on the same page too. “Poland has a great team at the moment with lots of very good players. We can play really well and have a lot of potential,” he says.

Despite a 12-year absence from football’s premier global tournament, Poland heads to Russia this summer among the top eight seeds.

Their elite position is evidence of the nation’s marked rise in international football (in 2013, Poland ranked 78th in the world; in 2018 it sits in seventh position). A quarterfinal run in France in 2016, in which the Eagles broke from group stages for the first time in 20 years, and striker Robert Lewandowski’s ascendance (he scored an all-time record 16 goals in qualifying for Russia) are just two of several performance highlights that coincide with a revived assurance around Polish prospects — forcing comparison to the golden generation of players who, in 1974 and 1982, claimed third-place finishes on the global stage.