Post-Mortem

I remember four years ago, after the Spurrier firing, when we were casting about wondering what now…and one morning, the wife is watching the Today show while I’m getting ready for work, and they break in with the news that the Washington Post is reporting that Joe Gibbs is returning.
Seriously, I squealed like a 10 year old at a Hannah Montana show.
I did about an hour and a half at work before heading to the cigar shop. It was already packed when I got there, somewhere between New Year’s Eve and the birth of your first grandchild – backslapping, cheering, everyone excited, there probably would have been hugging if the population had been less Republicans-over-50. At one point, we watched a good 15 minutes of a soccer game on Comcast Sports Net just because they were running a crawl saying that the Redskins had called a presser for 5 PM.
And then, when they finally flipped over to CNBC, an announcer starts off, “Well, it looks like the Washington Post was mistaken with their report–”
GASP. All of the oxygen was pretty much sucked out of the room.
“–about nuclear materials at a bombsite in Iraq.”
Everyone exhales furiously. One guy groused, “The next headline was almost ‘Twenty Guys Found Dead In Cigar Shop.'”
And at 5 PM, we were all down in the shop crouched around the TV. There they were: the three Super Bowl trophies. There were all the old assistants: Joe Bugel, Don Breaux, there’s Bubba Tyer who had JUST retired as trainer in the off-season – as the Dog famously said, “it looks like Space Cowboys up there.” And then the man himself, who only spoke for a couple of minutes – but when he was done, every one of us was ready to run through the wall right then and there.
It didn’t work out like we hoped. Because hope is like that – hope is like heroin and crystal meth and Kona coffee and 18 year old Bushmills all rolled into one. It makes you think “I can whup any man in this house” right before you think “I can whup EVERY man in this house!” And hope – in the absence of anything else – will leave you suspended in mid-air like Wile E. Coyote, looking at the camera holding up a little sign that says “Aw, bullshit” right before you plunge to your doom.
Just like the Redskins to do this to me right as I cave and come crawling back. Shit, at this point they should just hire Ike Turner and get it over with. Huh? Dead? When? Nobody sends me the memos anymore.