My Washington Commanders will be playing in the NFC Championship game next Sunday, one game away from the Super Bowl.
How is that sentence even possible?
I am the proverbial long-angsting NFL fan, who somehow has managed to stick with my home team through thick and thin. Over 30 years of excruciating, painful, gut-wrenching thin.
The NFL has been in my DNA, growing up in the Washington, D.C., area with two passionate Washington football loving parents. I adored the Over the Hill Gang’s grit in the 1970s, studiously read The Future Is Now, lit candles when Coach George Allen departed. I worshipped at the altar of Coach Joe Gibbs in the 1980s, lived and breathed the Hogs, the Fun Bunch, the radio narration of games by Huff and Puff.
We went to multiple playoff games, won three Super Bowls. We expected to win. I remember listening to postgame sports radio when a fan dialed 911 to report a robbery – a bad call in a game.
The waiting list for season tickets for Washington football was legendary − and decades long in the day. Years before StubHub and the NFL ticket exchange, I paid a scalper $300 for three tickets to a game at the beloved, rickety RFK Stadium in 1991 where wide receiver Art Monk set a passing record almost at our feet.
I finally put my name on the waiting list for season tickets in 2002 at the “new” stadium out in Landover, Maryland, miles from the nation’s capital and all our monuments and memorials the NFL likes to highlight on game broadcasts.
My number was 43,595: I thought I’d be well into my 80s before I ever nabbed a seat. But two years later in 2004, I got the call: I was in!
And somehow, just two months later, Gibbs was back as head coach. My nosebleed seats were so high, and I have such a fear of heights, that I would spill most of my beer trembling on the trek to the top and would rarely stand for the National Anthem. But I was there, ecstatic at the ‘In Gibbs We Trust’ signs that adorned the lower bowl.
What followed was a path so torturous I would never have imagined. Dismal seasons were hyphenated with a few highs: a couple playoff games under Gibbs 2.0; an unexpected playoff berth with the pylon-diving quarterback Taylor Heinicke; beating a Tom Brady-led team.
And of course the 2012 season that brought what I thought was our savior: the speedy, dual-threat, charismatic quarterback Robert Griffin III, the master of our spread offense. But after lighting up the league, the fans and the stadium, our hopes crumpled to the ground with RGIII’s knee injury in a playoff loss to the Seattle Seahawks.
I exited the stadium in tears that day.
The lows came fast: There was the time a local radio station gave away paper bags that read ‘Love the Team, Hate the Owner’ at a subway stop near the stadium. In a North Korea style move, team owner Daniel Snyder dispatched young staffers to confiscate the bags before anyone entered the gates.
Fans from opposing teams started packing the seats, chants of ‘defense, defense’ lacing through the air when our offense was on the field.
I left early in the third quarter of a game a few years ago and found there was a line – to LEAVE the stadium.
During a breast cancer awareness video on the Jumbotron in 2022, the stadium erupted in boos when Snyder’s wife, Tanya, a breast cancer survivor, appeared. Could the owner be so reviled that we seem to be booing breast cancer?
It got to the point that I couldn’t find anyone – friend/boyfriend/family/total stranger – to attend the games with me. For free.
But I made a decision: Despite the depressing carousel of coaches, quarterbacks and dysfunction, I was a fan for life; I was not going to give up. I went down to one single ticket.
I soon moved down to the lower bowl and found an amazing seat 17 rows from the bottom with amazing kindred spirits in my nearby seatmates who don their burgundy and gold and are loud and proud every single game. (Here’s looking at you James, Sharonda and the rest!)
And in 2023 came a jaw-dropping announcement: Snyder finally sold our team. Before last year’s season I attended a rally in downtown D.C. where new owner Josh Harris appeared, and the crowd exploded into a roar of ‘Thank you Josh!’
Then came the 2024-25 season: New coaches, a real GM, new players and a dazzling, poised-beyond-his-years quarterback in Jayden Daniels. The team doesn’t introduce individual players anymore; they run through the tunnel and the smoke as a unit before the game. Management pays respect to the players of our storied past, bringing back ‘legends’ to each game. Our fight song is back. We don’t just stand in the lower bowl; we dance, we prance, we hug.
OUR fans are the ones chanting ‘defense’ now. Heck, fans are even channeling the 1980s, repeatedly doing the wave. The stadium feels electric. And somehow we have now won two playoff games.
When Daniels threw a stunning Hail Mary to beat the Chicago Bears in October it crystallized in my mind when no one wanted to leave; we just wanted to soak up the moment: Yes sports can be cruel. Sometime three decades of cruel.
But when you ride out the misery, you sometimes find magic: That is what being a fan is all about.
Susan Miller is a Senior Breaking News editor for USA TODAY’s Nation team