New meat! New meat!
First, in the general sense ... the day I stop being excited about opening day of a new NFL and Redskins season, please point my wheelchair toward a cliff and give a stout shove. Burgundy and gold football has been in my blood since I was 10. 43 years and counting. I figure I have maybe 35 more before I no longer recognize what the beginning of September means. In a complicated, cynical adulthood, few things remain that are pure escapism, pure entertainment, pure passion. Redskins football is such a thing. And the always-present possibility that THIS just might be year the team climbs the mountain again, well, it's more than a sugary kid drink ... it's just this side of Life's Blood.
As to the more immediate, grounded sense ... to me, for anyone other than a truly unhappy sort there is enough to be excited about about this specific team to make optimism easy. There's a GM. Wasn't too long ago that alone would have made many a Redskins sourpuss smile. There's a new coach, selected by that GM, with a credible pedigree; a young, qualified coordinator of the sort we used to only dream about in the post-Norval days. There's a very young QB we've already seen do historic things, heading into year three with so much potential and promise it's not a stretch for even the skeptic to concede that the generation-long march in the desert searching for The Franchise may finally be over. And there is talent spread up and down the roster, on both sides of the ball, deeper than we've seen here in many seasons. No, not a finished product, but trending up. Sharply.
So it comes down to expectations. If anything but a playoff berth is one's base expectation heading into 2014, he may well be disappointed. Because we can't know how long it might take for the new coach and all the developing talent to hit their stride and turn potential into hard results. But to look at where this team and its fans have come from for most of the past 20 years, and look around today, it seems to me it would take an unhappy soul to not look to Sunday afternoon with anything but anticipation.
Bring it on.