Herman Edwards insists he doesn’t read the papers, so he really doesn’t know much about his old team’s problems these days.

“I got my own deal here,” Edwards said earlier this week about his new team, the Kansas City Chiefs. “I’ve got enough to worry about.”

Surely word has trickled out to the former Jets coach about all that ails them, from Curtis Martin’s aching knee, to Chad Pennington’s recovery from a second shoulder surgery, to the trade for Lee Suggs that was nixed after the Browns running back failed a physical.

But make no mistake: Edwards thinks back often to his five seasons with the Jets, even if his tenure came to an ill-fated end in January when the team rebuffed his request for a contract extension and allowed him to move to the Chiefs in exchange for a fourth-round draft pick. So rest assured those thoughts and emotions will swirl when he takes the field tonight at his previous coaching address, when the Chiefs visit the Giants in a preseason game at Giants Stadium.

“I have no regrets,” he said. “Whenever I look back, I look at the things I enjoyed. I always take away something good when I look back, and it was good in New York. I can’t look back at life and think it was bad. Everything happens for a reason. When one door closes, another one opens.”

It was a tumultuous time in New York for Edwards, who inherited Al Groh’s team in 2001 and became the first coach in team history to get to the playoffs in his first season. Edwards would take his teams to the postseason in three of his first four years, something no other Jets coach had ever done either. But it all came unglued last year, but mostly because of devastating injuries to Pennington and backup quarterback Jay Fiedler, not Edwards’ failures. Even so, the coach took his share of the blame, for everything from clock management to his player-friendly approach.

“In life, you like a storybook ending, but it didn’t happen,” Edwards said. “That’s where I started my (head-coaching) career. Was I the best coach there? No. Was I the worst coach? No. I was somewhere in between. Whatever they did, they can’t take away from us. Twenty years from now, it will still be there. This was his record.”

No hard feelings toward the Jets?

“None at all,” he said. “I’ve spoken to Woody Johnson, to Terry Bradway, to Mike Tannenbaum, and we’re fine. We had a good run. Me and that organization, we left on good terms. That needs to be said. We left on good terms, and we’re still on good terms.”

The way things are going for the Jets these days, the Edwards era will come to be looked upon as the good old days. And Edwards can look back and say he made the best move of his career.