The Washington Commanders once ruled an entire region. After years of struggle, the joy has returned

The images are still vivid. Still alive. Still fresh.

Even now, 42 years later. Actually make that especially now, with Jayden Daniels and the rest of the Washington Commanders authoring the most unexpected of seasons, rekindling the long forgotten passion of a notoriously put-upon fan base with every “wait, they're going for it?” fourth-down gamble, every last-second win, every just-right touch from new owner Josh Harris.

When the Commanders walk into Philadelphia on Sunday in the NFC championship game, it will be their first trip to the final step before the Super Bowl in more than three decades.

They aren't favored to win. Maybe there's some symmetry in that.

They weren't favored to win on that glorious gray January day in 1983 either when my father scored a pair of tickets for $20 bucks apiece (or about $900 less than standing room spots at Lincoln Financial Field are going for on the secondary market) and opted to take his sports-mad third-grader to see if Washington could fell Tom Landry and the rest of the Dallas Cowboys for a spot in the Super Bowl.

It is the corest of core memories.

The giant snowflakes that greeted us as we walked into RFK Stadium. The relentless chants of “We Want Dallas” that rang out for three-plus hours. The sound of 55,000 people in full throat singing a fight song that turned out to be more problematic than we realized back then, the plea to “fight for old D.C.” never louder than after Darryl Grant's late pick-6 sealed a trip to play for the Lombardi Trophy.

I was 8. I was hooked. And I was hardly the only one.

Hey, 50 straight years of sellouts can't be wrong.

It would be an overstatement to call Washington football religion back then. But only a little one.

Joe Gibbs. John Riggins. Joe Theismann. Art Monk. Doug Williams. Dexter Manley. Charles Mann. Darrell Green. The Fun Bunch. The Hogs. In a city that serves as the symbolic seat of democracy for the free world, they were royalty.

There was a closeness during the run of five NFC title games, four Super Bowl appearances and three championships that framed my childhood I still hold dear.

The spaghetti dinners at halftime of a 4 p.m. game, my grandmother ladling her homemade sauce out of her signature green pot. The volume on the TV (unless it was Pat Summerall and John Madden) turned down so we could listen to Frank Herzog, Sonny Jurgensen and Sam Huff's call on the radio.

My father complaining about the refs or the secondary. My mother hyperventilating during big downs (note: a tradition that carries on to this day). The outcome of a given Sunday setting the tone for the collective mood of an entire region for the ensuing week.

I was a kid. I just assumed this is how it was always going to be because this is how it had always been, at least to me.

The business of football got in the way.

In the late '90s the team bailed on RFK for a lifeless concrete slab 10 miles to the east in Maryland. Daniel Snyder, who grew up a fan like just about everyone else and became a millionaire many times over by the time he was in his early 30s, like just about no one else, bought the team in 1999. Misery soon followed.

My mother, bless her, hung in there. I did not. I grew up. I moved on. I became a sports writer, a career choice born on that January day long ago, one that has allowed me to perpetually chase that high I felt when the stadium shook and my “heroes” triumphed, the one I was sitting next to in particular.

My father died in the spring of 2010. We were not as close as I would have liked during his final years. That's on both of us. We talked somewhat infrequently and almost never about football, the one thing that had always bonded us despite our many differences.

What was there to talk about? Another coach getting fired? Another public relations disaster by Snyder? Another pratfall of a season?

A few days after he passed, my sister and I went to his house. My grandparents told us we should take what we want.

I grabbed a necklace with a cross on it. And that was going to be it until I opened a small drawer to find the two tickets from the ‘82 title game.

I had largely kept it together during the final days of his life, even as we stood at his bedside and watched him draw his last breaths at the (now) impossibly young age of 59.

I stood there for a long while and held them. And thought about that day. And all those happy Sundays that came after, when Washington won and the fight song blared and all seemed right with the world, if only for a few fleeting minutes.

The cross has long since disappeared. The tickets, however, are still around. I made it a point to pull them out of an old trunk this week. I thought about what Dad would think about this team. This run. He'd like Daniels (how can you not?) and he'd worry about the defense (me too Pop).

And on Sunday, I will sit with his 15-year-old grandson — the one he met just once — and watch. Afterward I'll call my mom for a debrief. And no matter how it goes I'll be grateful.

Not simply because the team is no longer an embarrassment. But because it has reconnected me — reconnected an entire generation really — to the joy and sense of community we feared might never return.

Hail victory. At long last.

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AP NFL: https://apnews.com/NFL

Will Graves, The Associated Press