After posting my Vick thoughts, spurred by the clamoring calls for Vick to be awarded the MVP trophy after 2 weeks of decent football amid a wash of adoring talk about how he’s overcome adversity – adversity caused by his enjoyment of torturing and killing dogs, but mostly just for betting on them – I really wanted the Redskins to beat the Eagles.  I mean, I hungered for it, craved it, but it took some time for me to believe they could do it.

It was Saturday, while the thoughts that became the Vick post brewed in my head, that I honestly believed the Redskins could win this game.  Not would, but could.  Originally, I’d seen it as a massacre, with Vick easily eluding defenders, who would then lose focus and let DeSean Jackson beat them deep a couple of times.  But on Saturday, I could see it happening.  Funnily enough, I remember thinking that Skins would end up knocking Vick out of the game and then getting beaten by Kolb.  I would have been able to handle that better than listening to another round of the heart-sickening tale of Vick’s Redemption Tour.

So on Saturday I pulled out my Lucky Shirt.  It shouldn’t be lucky.  It is a 1983 NFC Champions shirt (yes, I put on a 27-year-old shirt) from the season they got destroyed in the Super Bowl by the Raiders, one of the worst days of my life, and I’ve had some bad ones.  Since then, though, it’s become a talisman.  I wore it the day Mark Brunell beat the Cowboys on Monday Night Football with 2 deep bombs to Santana Moss in the last 2 minutes of the game.  Every year, when the Redskins need a big win, I pull it out and wear it.  Only once a year at most, though.  I didn’t wear it at all last year, which I knew would be so dismal that one game wouldn’t matter, so why lose the mojo?

Of course, I know the shirt doesn’t do anything to affect anything except my own mood, but that’s good enough for me.

I watched the game, too.  I don’t often get to see the Redskins play, but many times – especially the last few years – even when I’ve had the chance, I couldn’t do it.  My entire life, I’ve lived and died with how a football team does on the field, as my father did before me.  With the seasons of futility and mockery, I’ve gotten so sick of the feeling of lying on bed on a Sunday night, not able to sleep as I run the game through my head, imagining if just this play hadn’t happened, or that one, and making myself sick – literally, physically ill – over the game.  My friend doesn’t understand it, but it’s one thing I am irrational about to an almost frightening degree.  Actually, it’s not almost – I scare everyone around me, as well as myself sometimes.  I don’t watch all of the games mostly out of respect to Lady Aravan, who hates my ranting and screaming and jumping and pacing and guttural shouts of joy or anger as the game goes on.  I literally cannot sit down when they are playing.

So, anyway, the fact that I watched the game says a lot (admittedly, I missed much of the 3rd quarter’s ineptitude while I did yoga).  I took such savage, primal joy out of watching Vick get sandwiched between two Redskins and sent out of the game.  My hand shook as I tried to eat dinner with minutes left in the game.  I honestly thought I was going to throw up on the dinner table.  And when that final pass settled into the arms of the Redskins, when it painfully sat for an instant in the hands of an Eagle, I let out such a shout of joy and release that my throat burned and the windows rattled.

So, yeah, good game.