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Redskins Find a Reason To Celebrate Their Season
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Then as the demolition of the Cowboys, their hated rival began and the score grew from 7-0, to 10-3, to 20-3 and finally 27-6, the players noticed something strange in the numbers. Moss said something first, grabbing Fletcher's arm, imploring him to do the math: subtract 6 from 27 and you get 21. Taylor's number.
"We don't think it was by accident we won by 21," Gibbs said after the game.
Asked about this, Fletcher smiled.
"I don't believe in coincidences," he said.
It was hard to judge how seriously Dallas took Sunday's game knowing it had already clinched the top seed in the looming NFC playoffs. But the Cowboys did play their regular starters and appeared to be fighting to win a game they didn't need. Still, they appeared helpless against the frenzy of Washington's defense. Dallas was, after all, missing its best player in wide receiver Terrell Owens and that might have provided a bit of an explanation for the way the Redskins dominated.
Still, when asked after the game for a reason why his team had been overwhelmed, Cowboys Coach Wade Phillips said: "They were inspired. They were fired up and playing hard. They did some good things that way."
At that moment, down a FedEx Field hallway, Gibbs was still standing in front of his players in a locker room that many players described as euphoric. Rarely a man of many words in front of his players, Gibbs told them that Snyder, the coaches and Gibbs himself appreciated the players for letting them come along for this ride.
It was classic Gibbs: understated, deflecting the credit to someone else. And in a locker room where they nursed so many emotional wounds from a season with five losses that could have been wins, the words were welcomed like the looming six-hour flight to the Pacific Northwest.
Just four weeks before, at the end of the loss to Buffalo, Gibbs illegally called two timeouts in a row in an attempt to rattle Bills kicker Rian Lindell as he lined up for the winning field goal. The resulting penalty gave Lindell an easy kick and several Redskins players grumbled on the sideline about their 67-year-old coach the game had passed by.
On Sunday night, on that same sideline they laughed and clapped and danced. When the clock wound to zero, clinching the 9-7 record and the last playoff spot in the NFC, they ran joyously to the center of the field.
"It felt like this was our destiny," Fletcher said.
In a season they will never forget.
