DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- When Carl Edwards flew into the airport adjacent to Daytona International Speedway on Thursday, he wondered how he'd feel returning to a race track for the first time since he narrowly lost the Sprint Cup championship in late November. Would memories of that title chase, which Tony Stewart won in a tiebreaker, eat at him? Would he fixate on the missed opportunities that kept him from claiming his first crown on NASCAR's highest level?

After making his way over to the big 2.5-mile track and changing into his new blue and white firesuit, he realized he did feel different -- but perhaps not in the way everyone might have anticipated.

"I feel a little more excited, I feel more confidence," Edwards said on the opening day of Preseason Thunder testing. "I didn't know if that's how I'd feel. I didn't know if it would be something that would feel nagging, or something like that. I feel good, excited to go racing. What happened last year was one of the greatest battles I've ever been in [in] in a race car, and I feel like I learned a lot. ... I've accepted the fact that we didn't win it, but I'm also really excited about the way that we could potentially run this year. So I feel more confident than I've felt, ever. Kind of more calm, you know? Because I know we can do it."

Edwards adopted that mindset in the immediate aftermath of last season's finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway, where Stewart won the race, Edwards finished second, and Stewart's five victories -- all of them coming in the Chase -- proved the championship difference after the standings ended up in a tie. He's maintained it in the month since NASCAR's Champions Week in Las Vegas, occasionally allowing himself to slip into the what-if game, but always coming back to the same place.

"I thought about stuff. There were times when I thought, man, I could have done this, I could have done that. But truly, not a lot," he said. "I'm very, very fortunate. I believe ... we're all fortunate [that] there wasn't an instance in that Chase where we really screwed something up. I feel like we had the best Chase, on average, that anyone has ever had. The points we accumulated, the saves -- we had days like Kansas and Martinsville where we were legitimately 25th-place cars, and we did a good job.

"I heard people comment and say, ah, well, they could have gotten a point here, they could have gotten a bonus point here. We also could have really screwed up and been back there fighting for sixth or eighth or something, and we weren't. I'm proud of it. I thought we did the most with what we had. Tony just did the unbelievable. They just pulled out an unbelievable Chase. That's how I really feel about it. It's not like I'm wake up, kick-the-dog mad or anything like that. I'm at peace with it."

So, it seems, is his No. 99 team. Three weeks ago, car owner Jack Roush held a meeting in which his organization discussed the end of last season and looked forward to 2012. At one point, Roush asked Edwards' crew chief, Bob Osborne, what he would have done differently last year. Osborne's answer, as Edwards remembers it, came without hesitation: "I wouldn't do anything differently. If we started this thing again tomorrow, that's how I'd approach it. We'd race the same way we did. We did the absolute best we could do."

To those on the outside, the impression was that Osborne took the championship near-miss very hard, especially since he skipped Champions Week festivities in Las Vegas. Instead, he went back to work in the shop. "Vegas costs money, and Vegas wasn't for us," Osborne said Thursday. "I felt like I should have been back at the shop working. At the end of the day, that was [crew chief] Darian [Grubb] and Tony's deal. I hoped they enjoyed it, they deserved it, for sure. We're working hard, and have been working hard, and looking forward to really getting started on the meat of the season."

In actuality, Osborne said he was able to reach a peace over how last year ended, much like his driver did.

"I reached it pretty quick," he said. "We show up to the race track every weekend with the intention of doing the best we possibly can. Regardless of the outcome, myself and Carl and everyone on this program shows up and does absolutely the best they can. When the weekend's over, I don't look back, and I don't ask my guys to look back. I know Carl doesn't look back and say, 'Man, we didn't do a good enough job here, we didn't do a good enough job there.' We do highlight the things we could have done differently, but we understand the particular situations don't necessarily go the way you want them to go. ... There were a lot of opportunities that we didn't get the absolute most out of, but that didn't have anything to do with anyone not doing a good job or not doing the best they could."

Osborne will concede, there were moments when he wondered about the what-ifs. But he moved past them. "I think it's important to let it all go," he said. "But I am human, too. There are times you look back and say, one more point here would have made a huge difference. And you look at not only things that our program did, but you also look at things other programs did to change how the points wound up. There are a lot of things that we look at. But that was last year. We worry about this year now."

When the subject turns to last season, though, Edwards takes comfort in his results, and an average finish of 4.9 over the final 10 races that would have been good enough to win any previous Chase. Stewart beat him with, he thinks, a once-in-a-lifetime kind of charge at the end.

"Truthfully, I think we ran a hell of a Chase," Edwards said. "If we do that again this year, I challenge anyone to do what Tony did. I don't know that that's ever going to be possible again. No offense to anybody or anything, but if you said, you have to go win half the Chase races to win this championship, I'd say, man, I don't know that anybody could do that. But they did. What I'm saying is, over the next years, if we can perform like we're performing now, we're going to be tough to beat."

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