
We quit on them. We felt betrayed. Their incompetence made us feel ashamed. We became disloyal and bitter and ultimately stopped caring about them. We didn’t feel good about ourselves but we did what we did.
A sad story: two friends, good friends, childhood friends, estranged, like two brothers that had a fight one day and it hurt so much they didn’t speak.
For 33 years.
What happened over that span would make for a compelling movie script about a ruinous relationship.
A family rift. Ripping apart all Washingtonians and the city itself and surrounding suburbs. Our team, the Redskins, lost its way like few organizations ever have. The three-time Super Bowl champions epitomized laughable lousy losing. They languished. The team drafted poorly, signed players past their primes, fired countless coaches, and will be remembered for suffering through one of the worst extended streaks of pro sports ineptitude. The incompetence was immeasurable, the heartache so intense we felt we had to separate ourselves from it in order to function, to not look at all the ugliness. We needed distance from the problem. We needed space.
We stopped caring so we stopped watching because it hurt too much, like seeing your kid stop trying, losing a will.
We moved on with our lives, got married, had kids and careers, traveled on business, and started thinking about retirement all the while never even fathoming anything would change with the team we fell in love with as little boys.
Along the way, the Internet happened and changed everything. That distracted us from our team’s torment. We found out about Google and Facebook and now ChatGPT and Copilot.
Catastrophes happened: 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis. People died: Len Bias, Princess Diana, Kobe Bryant, Bob Uecker, Bill Walton, our parents, uncles and aunts, some of our co-workers, some of our friends.
Our lives continued however they did and our team kept losing so we kept avoiding them. Life was hard enough.
The Giants went to two Super Bowls and I hated it so much because the Giants fans I know are jerks. Glory in the Meadowlands; gore at Fed Up Field. Utter agony.
I got fired a few times, won a few professional awards, wrote a thousand blogs, coached my kids, and strived for something mostly to write better. Kept going while unfulfilled about my boyhood first love: the Redskins. What choice was there?
I quit on them because I felt they quit on us. A gaggle of quitters we all were. The worst quitter of all of us was Dan Snyder who taught us all how not to live, how to put his own interests above everyone else’s.
This devolved into a pathetic tale of interpersonal clumsiness, self-pity, weak mindsets, woe, and dismay.
All this misery. Went on for so long – decade after decade – that we reconfigured our lives so that we didn’t even care anymore. We de-prioritized watching our team play.
We free fell into the black abyss…
Now this.
Now bliss.
Saturday night, the Skins went into Detroit and beat down the team with the league’s best record. This was not a fluke; this was a barbecued scorching. The Skins looked better, played better, and are better than the Lions who were expected to make their first trip to the Super Bowl.
How is this happening? Why is this happening? Is this happening? I’m old enough to question whether anything is true. The age of misinformation, disinformation, and AI hallucination makes me question so much. I’m less inclined than in 1991 to believe anything even if I saw it with our own eyes on TV last night.
I never thought I would see the Skins play so well ever again and definitely not in a playoff game for rights to advance to the NFC title game. A running game that couldn’t be corralled. Repeated conversions on fourth downs. No turnovers. Long pass plays for touchdowns. Interceptions in the clutch.
These are all things the Skins hardly ever have done for 33 years. Never all in one game, an orchestrated gem by an entire team grooving together to a great song, a prom dance that just plays out so everyone has a great time with everybody just good friends.
Most of the players on this team weren’t conceived in 1991. But we were. We were alive. We remember how it used to be, what the Skins were before they became no longer a part of our lives before Dan Snyder ruined our Redskins.
The Skins started out 10 and 0 that season and I wrote a humorous hype article for my company’s newsletter. “You really use humor well,” the president of the company wrote to me. His confidence boost propelled me to keep writing about sports in a fun way and that led to launching the Sammy Sportface blog and me writing this morning about what happened last night which, I believe, none of us will forget for at least 33 years or until we pass on to the mysterious afterlife.
On Saturday, we saw a quarterback, Jayden Daniels (“The Jedi”), throw down the greatest rookie quarterback playoff performance in NFL history. Nearly perfect passing the ball, totally perfect in his decisions and scrambles for first downs, and reassuring wearing his uncommonly calm demeanor and humble disposition. If Jayden Daniels never plays another football game, he will have painted a masterpiece football piece of art, and it happened last night. It was his Mona Lisa.
But he will play and paint again. Next week some NFC team is going to have to solve the puzzle of stopping this fascinating talent from out-smarting, out-maneuvering, out-running, out-passing, out-preparing, and out-thinking them.
Forevermore for what he did last night and this season – last-second game-winning passes galore – he will be mobbed by DC fans for reuniting a broken family estranged for far too long. Who is this guy? Where did he come from?
The game reminded me of the NFC title contest in 1972 when everything broke the Skins way in their 26-3 romp over the Cowboys.
When they needed a touchdown last night, they got it. A first down, done. Need a pic? Got it. All night long. A sight we hadn’t seen in what feels like forever.
We are all much older now than we were in 1991. We go to doctors more often. We don’t move around as fast. Our legs ache more and sometimes our backs. We go to bed earlier. Our kids are out of the house having graduated from college.
Many of those kids weren’t born in 1991. So they don’t know the depth of what happened last night.
“The Skins used to be great,” I would tell my kids when they were around the house.
“Sure, Dad,” they would say
With age comes perspective. We can gaze far back into the past and remember how things used to be, how we felt then when the Skins whipped the Buffalo Bills to win their third Super Bowl. Ah, the glory days. I remember after they beat the Lions in the NFC title that year, clinching their Super Bowl slot, crookedly running down Wisconsin Avenue in D.C. full of beer and drunk on delicious delirium and stumbling into a bar there and seeing my cousin Peaches. We didn’t want to go home. Our Skins were Super Bowl bound. We knew it might never happen again and so far we’ve been right.
The glory days we remember. The dark decades we want to forget. They were blinding, confusing, and hard to endure. We felt flummoxed and forlorn. It was a big negative in our lives admitting the Skins were terrible.
Yet we will never forget either last night’s game. Our childhood friend returned from a long trip to someplace unknown. Having severed ties, we figured we would probably never speak again. To each other we were dead.
We were resigned to the relationship being done.
Then last night we found out our old friend is still alive and that we were, too. We sat in our living rooms and had our celebrations. This time we texted our jubilant feelings to each other; in 1991 texting wasn’t a thing so we called each other on the phone. World’s away 1991 was.
For decades we felt indifferent and sad. A relationship gone so bad.
But our Skins are back.
A time like no other was had.
Saturday night.
Our family is back together.
Everybody in Washington is so glad.
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Sammy Sportface, a sports blogger, galvanizes, inspires, and amuses The Baby Boomer Brotherhood. And you can learn about his vision and join this group's Facebook page here:
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