With more than thirty Redskins seasons under my belt, I am still always surprised at my level of anticipation in the week immediately preceding opening day. In the world before the internet – that did exist as hard as it may be for some of you to fathom – opening day for this Canadian lad, meant little more than sitting on the edge of a seat, anxiously awaiting the first glimpse at all the shiny new toys that you read about in the Street & Smith the month before. That’s if I had the good grace that the game was on television, which was more of an exception, than the norm anyway.
With the internet, came access. Slowly but surely those dark days between the last game and the next first game got shorter and shorter. Tapping into the Redskins matrix myself in 2002 with this site, meant not only getting more plugged in, but ultimately more plugged in than I could have ever really imagined. And that “offseason” got shorter and shorter. In the early days it was just draft coverage. Then it moved to draft and combine coverage, and expanded further still into player analysis of all draft eligibles, and the list went on and on and on. Eventually it reached the point where there just wasn’t an offseason.
And yet still, opening day jitters. Even though every piece of the puzzle that will be in place on opening day this Sunday, has been poured over, meticulously scrutinized, and questioned to an nth degree… still, I have the exact same feeling of anxious anticipation.
It doesn’t come from a lack of knowledge like it did way back when, because that gap has been narrowed to a slit. So where does it come from?
Because from the moment that I started looking at opening NFL lines and information at the william hill ireland page, until the coin toss before the game, will be one of the longest weeks of the year. I’d say the longest, but there’s that whole Christmas thing that is pretty good. I think I may put the level of anticipation of the start of another Redskins season, second to only that.
I will look at the Houston Texans’ roster and depth charts and I will think about the individual match-ups. I will visit certain websites that I know to have constantly updated injury reports. I will listen to every presser I can find on Redskins.com, amongst others. I will read articles. I will read blogs. I will listen to podcasts and radio shows. I will up my activity on our THN Facebook page. I will tweet more from our Twitter account.
All of it building in some sort of organized, manic manner, into this charged, organic crescendo that if timed right, occurs at about 12:59pm on Sunday afternoon.
I don’t know where it comes from. I don’t care where it comes from.
Let’s go play some football.
Hail to the Redskins.