Funny, it doesn’t feel historic.

The New England Patriots stand this morning on the cusp of immortality. For all they’ve accomplished since 2001 — the 3 Super Bowl crowns, the 5 division titles, the 80 victories in their last 105 games — the Pats have one more mountain to climb. And it’s a big one.

A Super Bowl win this year would give them four championships in six seasons. That’s heady territory, the province of the gods.

The Pats’ three titles in five years is big stuff, putting them on par with such teams as the 1980s San Francisco 49ers and the 1990s Dallas Cowboys. But four in six years is another level. The only teams in the 87-year history of professional football to reach those heights are Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers (who won five NFL titles in the seven seasons from 1961 to ’67) and the Pittsburgh Steelers of the 1970s (four Super Bowl championships in the six seasons from 1974 to ’79).

Four more wins, and the Pats join them. All they have to do is beat the New York Jets today in their opening playoff game, at 1 p.m. at Gillette Stadium, win a semifinal-round game at San Diego next weekend, win the AFC championship game the following weekend (which will probably be on the road, but could be at home), and then the Super Bowl on Feb. 4 in Miami.

Okay, it sounds daunting — and it is — but it’s nothing that hasn’t been done before. The Steelers won three games on the road prior to winning the Super Bowl last February in Detroit. New England itself won three in a row on the road en route to the 1985 Super Bowl.

So why isn’t the excitement level higher? Why isn’t there a bigger sense of anticipation today, the day the quest for history begins?

Well, for one thing, the Pats themselves — who pride themselves on never looking further ahead than the next game — discourage such talk.

“It’s just business as usual,” defensive back Artrell Hawkins said last week.

For another, these Patriots haven’t exactly seemed like the Borg of football this year. Yes, they had a very good record (12-4). But of their 12 wins, only 2 (against the Jets on Sept. 17 and the Bears on Nov. 26) came against teams that finished the season with winning records. People may not know the specifics, but they have the sense that these Pats didn’t really accomplish very much during the regular season.

That’s one way of looking at it. But there’s another, perhaps more accurate, way. The Bengals were flying high — unbeaten and dreaming Super Bowl dreams — when the Patriots laid the wood to them, 38-13, on Oct. 1. The Vikings were 4-2 and had just manhandled defending NFC champion Seattle when New England beat them, 31-7, on Halloween Eve. The Pats’ last two wins, at Jacksonville and at Tennessee, came against teams that a) had a combined record of 14-6 in the 10 weeks before playing New England, and b) both had postseason berths on the line — and, thus, everything to play for — when they faced the Patriots. All those wins were more impressive than a glance at the final standings would indicate.

Besides, it’s the playoffs. Who’s had more postseason success in the new millennium than the Patriots?

“We’ve been in a bunch of these [postseason] games and we’ve been pretty successful,” quarterback Tom Brady said last week, referring to the team’s 10-1 playoff record since 2001, “so I think there’s some confidence that we have.”

Confidence, yes. And also a sense of urgency. For all their tunnel-vision talk of playing them one at a time, the Patriots are well aware of what they’ve accomplished. In 2004, when they set the NFL record for consecutive games won, NFL Films caught defensive stalwart Willie McGinest — who has since moved on to Cleveland — smiling and saying to no one in particular, “We don’t talk about things like this around here, but . . . it’s nice.”

Aware not only of what they have accomplished, but also of what potential glories lie ahead.

“You work . . . hard to get to this point,” coach Bill Belichick acknowledged last week, “[and] you’d like to think that that’s when you really want to put your foot on the gas and try to take advantage of the opportunity. There’s no guarantee that this opportunity will ever be here again, for any of us.”

The opportunity begins today.