“Forty years is a long time,” Landis’ Billy Ray Barnes laughs into a telephone from a Christmas get-together in Albemarle. “I’m not sure I remember much of anything.”

But Barnes is fibbing — at least a little. Sure, he’s conveniently forgotten most of his own heroics on that frigid day in 1960, but he remembers the deeds of his teammates clear as a bell.

It was 40 years ago today, December 26, 1960, just weeks before John Kennedy would be sworn in as president, when Barnes’ Philadelphia Eagles and the Green Bay Packers squared off for the NFL championship.

The NFL was just emerging from the giant shadow cast by Major League Baseball, still the dominant sport in the land. Things were different then. Team meetings lasted five minutes and players lit up smokes at halftime.

Most linemen weighed 220 pounds. Barnes was considered a big back at 192. No one lifted weights and there was no “off-season” in which to work out. In the spring and summer, players sold cars or insurance or tended bar to support their families. Then they’d report to training camp for a couple of weeks, run a few miles and play the season.

Most players made no more than $10,000 a year from the sport, although a glamor player on a glamor team — like New York Giants star Frank Gifford — might pull in a few hundred extra bucks by doing commercials for razor blades. There were no endorsement opportunities for the Eagles, whose only reasonably glamorous players were the last of the two-way standouts, Chuck Bednarik, starting to fade at 35, and an old warhorse of a quarterback named Norm Van Brocklin, who was in his final season.

“The money is all relative,” said Barnes. “We were doing better than the average working man. I drove a cadillac and had a little cash in my pocket and, hell, a loaf of bread was 15 cents. I felt fortunate. Besides you didn’t play for the money, you played to win a championship.”

The regular season was only 12 games and there was no playoff system. It was simply Western Conference champ (Green Bay) vs. Eastern Conference champ (Philly)for the NFLtitle. This was the first year of the AFL’s existence. The first Super Bowl was still six years away.

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Barnes had been drafted on the second round by Philadelphia after a stellar career at Wake Forest, which included making All-America and becoming the ACC’s first 1,000-yard rusher. He was an immediate hit. Working-class fans loved the hard-living, hard-playing style of the kid from a North Carolina textile town. Barnes rushed for nearly 2,000 yards in first three seasons (1957-59), caught a ton of passes, scored 15 TDs, even made the Pro Bowl a couple of times.

The Eagles took wing along with Barnes. They won just six games his first two years, but then, in 1959, after the arrival of the ornery Van Brocklin, who sat a gifted but youthful quarterback named Sonny Jurgensen on the bench, they improved to 7-5. In 1960, they went 10-2. They lost their opener, then squeaked past an expansion Dallas team 27-25 in Week 2. From there, they rolled.

And back home in Landis, folks who had once been die-hard Redskins fans crowded around black-and-white television sets on Sundays whenever the Eagles were the Game of the Week.

Ironically, 1960 would be one of the worst statistical seasons of Barnes’ career. He twisted his knee on special teams and wound up rushing for just 315 yards and four touchdowns. But he hung in there. He realized that with Van Brocklin at the helm, the Eagles had a chance to win the city’s first title since 1949.

“Norm was the greatest quarterback I ever saw,” said Barnes. “Jurgensen had the best arm, but Van Brocklin was a real field general. He didn’t accept mistakes. If you dropped a pass or blew an assignment, you didn’t want to go back to the huddle, because he would let you know about it.”

Van Brocklin was the team’s driving force, more so than head coach Buck Shaw, who silently prowled the sidelines in his horned-rim glasses with an overcoat pulled tight around his throat.

“Buck coached like a banker,” said Barnes. “We didn’t see him from Friday to Sunday. He knew you had a job to do and expected you to do it. If you couldn’t do it, he got someone else.”

The Packers (8-4) were not what they would shortly become (they beat the Giants 37-0 in the NFL title game in ‘61), but they were good. Legendary coach Vince Lombardi had arrived in ‘59 and had quickly whipped into shape a struggling franchise that hadn’t won the Western Conference since World War II.

“Green Bay was the league joke before Lombardi,” said Barnes. “Anytime you messed up, coaches would threaten you by saying they were going to ship your butt to Green Bay. It was as cold there then, as it is now.”

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The ‘60 Packers had a stout defense led by linebacker Ray Nitschke and an offense paced by the Hall of Fame trio of quarterback Bart Starr, halfback Paul Hornung and fullback Jim Taylor. The real problem was Taylor, a 215-pound Louisana locomotive with a flat-top. Taylor possessed an iron jaw, tree trunks for legs and a startling burst of speed.

“They had all those great players,” said Barnes. “They were supposed to win. On the other hand, we may not have been the greatest football players in the world, but we believed every time we took the field that no one could beat us. That team had a special little bond.”

Barnes, who was 25 in 1960, remembers Dec. 26 as being rather mild, but that’s because he won. The losers have chillier memories. Taylor recalled years ago that the game was played on an icy field that would burn the rubber right off his cleats when he tried to cut.

Despite the chill, 60,000 feverish fans crammed into Philly’s Franklin Field at the University of Pennsylvania. With Taylor leading the way with 105 rushing yards, the Packers took a 13-10 lead with a score in the fourth quarter. Eagle fans buried their heads.

But a youngster named Ted Dean returned the ensuing kickoff nearly to midfield. Then the Eagles drove against the clock, the cold and that fierce Packer defense. The man who carried the ball time after time for first downs on that fateful drive was the banged-up Barnes. He led his team in rushing with over 50 yards. The drive, biggest in Eagle history, ended with a touchdown and a 17-13 lead.

Out of timeouts and with the clock running down, Starr nearly brought his team back one last time. Green Bay reached the Eagle 22 with time for perhaps two more plays. Max McGee, later the hero of the first Super Bowl, was the primary receiver on the next play, but was blanketed on the sideline. Starr’s second option was Taylor drifting out of the backfield and he found him wide open in the middle of the field. The huge horse made the catch and smelled the goal line.

But Barnes recalls how teammate Bobby Jackson, a little defensive back from Alabama, came up to meet Taylor. Jackson and Bednarik dragged Taylor to the frozen ground at the Eagle 9. Then, Bednarik pinned the Packer star down like a wrestler, refusing to let him get up. Time expired and the Eagles were world champions.

Barnes says that thrill was not as great as when he and his Wake teammates won the NCAA baseball championship inOmaha five years earlier — “I was a lot younger then” — but it remains a magic moment in what he calls a “blessed life.”

“It was a great day,” Barnes said. ‘For the team and Philadelphia.”

Each of the Eagles received a check for $5,126 — pocket change for today’s pro athletes, but a windfall at the time.

“I sort of appreciated it,” laughs Barnes, who will only cackle when asked how he spent it.

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Philadelphia, which hasn’t won a world championship since that day (it did reach the Super Bowl in 1980), honored the long-ago champs earlier this year at a dinner. There, Barnes ran into his old left tackle J.D. Smith, whom he had not seen since 1961. The old warriors recognized one another instantly even after 40 years. That special little bond of the ‘60 Eagles was still there.

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Mike London is the assistant sports editor of the Post.