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Nick Wass

I was in the stands Sunday when my Washington Commanders <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2024/11/10/steelers-beat-commanders-28-27/" target=_blank>lost </a>to the Pittsburgh Steelers, 28-27. It was heartbreaking. But I left the stadium with more optimism — or, at least, less pessimism — about the future of our bitterly fractured country in the wake of last week’s election.

To understand why, you have to understand what Washington’s football team once meant to the D.C. metropolitan area. In the 1980s, when I moved here, the toughest ticket in town was for a Redskins game. (Apologies for mentioning the team’s racist former name, which I won’t repeat.)

How hard was it to get into RFK Stadium to see some football? Every single home game was sold out. Season tickets were passed down in families like heirlooms. You could show up before kickoff and take your chances with the scalpers offering nosebleed seats for twice the official price — that era’s equivalent of Seat Geek — but otherwise, you were out of luck. I attended games occasionally because The Post had multiple sets of season tickets, and editors gave them to staff members as perks.

Being there on a fall Sunday was glorious. Visually, the stadium’s bowl was a sea of burgundy and gold. Aurally, there was a nonstop deafening roar — especially when the team’s archrivals, the Dallas Cowboys, came to town.

Sociologically, the experience was remarkable. RFK on game day was the one place where all walks of life in the region came together for a common purpose. In one row there could be, say, a Republican lobbyist from upscale McLean with his wife, sitting next to a couple of young anti-nuclear activists who rented an apartment on Capitol Hill, next to an African American bus driver and her family who lived in up-and-coming Prince George’s County. And when the team’s vaunted offensive line, called “the Hogs,” opened a lane for running back John Riggins to plow into the end zone, all these people who otherwise had nothing to do with one another were suddenly hugging and high-fiving as if they were family.

It helped that the team was good enough to win the <a href="https://www.commanders.com/team/history/" target=_blank>Super Bowl three times</a>, in 1983, 1988 and 1992. That feeling of community survived the team’s move to its new home in Landover, Maryland — now called Northwest Stadium — in 1997. But it did not survive the purchase of the team by billionaire businessman <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2019/05/22/its-been-years-since-daniel-snyder-bought-redskins-heres-season-by-season-look/" target=_blank>Daniel Snyder in 1999</a>.

The less said about the long, dark night of Snyder’s ownership the better. Suffice it to note that in 24 years under Snyder, the team had 10 head coaches, 27 starting quarterbacks, a measly six playoff appearances, zero championships — and, in his last full year as owner, the lowest attendance in the NFL. Also, I should mention that Snyder adamantly refused to change the team’s name long after fans and even television announcers became uncomfortable using it, and he relented only after the murder of George Floyd put such a bright light on issues of racial justice that he had no choice.

For years, at home games, visiting fans often outnumbered Washington’s. Before Sunday, I hadn’t gone to a game in years.

Now, of course, the Commanders have a new ownership team led by billionaire investor Josh Harris, a new coach in Dan Quinn, a dazzling rookie quarterback in <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2024/11/04/jayden-daniels-awards/" target=_blank>Jayden Daniels</a>, a surprising 7-3 record and a big game coming Thursday against the Philadelphia Eagles with first place in the NFC East division at stake. At the jam-packed stadium, it felt almost like old times.

Sitting to my left were three Hispanic guys, immigrants from El Salvador. In front of me was a man of South Asian heritage. To my right was an African American man in his 50s who had brought his daughter to the game. Behind me were a couple of White men who had the questionable taste to be Steelers fans.

It is all but guaranteed, given Tuesday’s election result, that someone in my little neighborhood of seats voted for <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/donald-trump/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Donald Trump</a>. I could have asked, but I decided not to; nobody was there to talk politics. We were there to cheer the team and taunt the Steelers guys — and to endure their woofing when, in the end, the Commanders fell short.

The point isn’t that we should all now put our political differences aside and join in for a big group hug. It’s that our disagreements are not relevant every moment of every day. We may not be able to stand together, exactly, but we do often stand side by side.

The point is also that lost glory does not have to be lost forever. There were times when it seemed the Commanders would never come back. Yet here they are.

2009 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary

Coal to Cream: A Black Man’s Journey Beyond Color to an Affirmation of Race (Free Press, 1999)

Last Dance in Havana: The Final Days of Fidel and the Start of the New Cuban Revolution (Free Press, 2004)

Eugene Robinson writes a column on politics and culture and hosts a weekly online chat with readers. In a three-decade career at The Washington Post, Robinson has been city hall reporter, city editor, foreign correspondent in Buenos Aires and London, foreign editor, and assistant managing editor in charge of the paper’s Style section.

Eugene Robinson

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Commanders season puts team’s dark era behind it with optimism 

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