Today in D.C. Headlines to start your Wednesday in D.C., Maryland and Virginia

For the first time, you can feel what it might mean if Washington’s football team could be pried out of Daniel Snyder’s seedy, success-strangling hands. For now, the franchise remains on a strangely contradictory course. On the field, first-year coach Ron Rivera and his young team are performing like a strong, fresh breeze. Off it, Snyder continues to recirculate his bad air and give the organization an unsavory whiff. For the good of all — the town, the market, the league — the NFL should clear the noxious Snyder out of the building, as it has every right and reason to, so the franchise can truly move on and be whole.

With their upset of the unbeaten Pittsburgh Steelers on Monday night, Rivera and his crew allowed you to imagine that this team might truly be competitively remade. Now imagine the unlimited future it might have under a new owner who didn’t run his affairs like a crapulent mini-Caligula.

Full cooperation and a new leaf is what Snyder superficially pledged when the league began investigating serial sexual harassment in his organization, the soft porn vids and other scummy workplace abuses. What the NFL apparently got instead is bullying obstruction and unrepentant dodging.

Read more about Snyder’s ownership of the Washington Football Team:

• Washington Football Team minority owners have a deal to sell, but Snyder is blocking it
• Lewd cheerleader videos, sexist rules: Ex-employees decry Washington’s NFL team workplace
• 15 women accuse former Redskins employees of sexual harassment and verbal abuse

In August, The Post’s Tim Carman reviewed places around Washington that can satisfy a sudden craving for the classic carryout combo: wings and mumbo sauce.

After nearly five months of working from home — or living at work, as the Eeyores among us describe the situation — I’ve been experiencing this strange phenomenon: I miss Washington. The very city the president derides as a swamp, the same place that much of the country views as an argument for adult day care, the land once called a “hellishly humid pit of despair with unbearable traffic.”

The people who live in and around the District know the difference between Washington, the seat of the U.S. government, and Washington, a city of contradictions and bleak disparities that, despite it all, has more heart and soul than America will ever know. Duke Ellington. Shirley Horn, Roberta Flack, Donny Hathaway, Fugazi, Minor Threat, Chuck Brown, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Billy Taylor. I have listened to these artists, and others nurtured in the broken diamond of Washington, countless times in the weeks since my house became my office and my adopted city became a stranger to me, experienced only through brief trips into town for touchless takeout orders.

This is what weeks of self-isolation will do to you: It will make you nostalgic for a place that’s still your home. I think this explains my sudden, and unexpected, craving for wings and mumbo sauce. Even though the sauce has roots in Chicago, where Select Brands owns the “MUMBO” trademark, if you want to experience Washington — its highs, its lows, its poverty, its gentrification, its beauty, its decay — all you need to do is visit the city’s many carryouts, so many of which trade in the classic combo.

Here are Tim Carman’s recommendations:

• Wings & More Wings on Benning Road in Northeast Washington
• Yum’s II near Logan Circle in Northwest Washington
• Hong Kong Delite on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue in Southeast Washington

When retired Rear Adm. Paul H. Engel died of covid-related causes in May, his family hoped that the pandemic would be under control by the time his military funeral could take place in Arlington National Cemetery.

Instead, with the potentially lethal disease surging again, Engel’s family had to contend with last-minute directives by Virginia’s governor that reduced the size of public gatherings and resign themselves to a scaled-down ceremony that, though still moving, seemed insufficient for the officer and man they loved.

“You feel you almost got a little shortchanged — for the career that he had and the service he had for his country,” said his son Michael Engel, 60, of Park City, Utah.

Families in mourning are still struggling to adjust to the pandemic’s impact on an experience that is deeply wrenching under the best of circumstances. Funeral directors, bracing for a second wave of covid-19 deaths, said they are better prepared than they were in the early days of the pandemic but just as unsettled by the disease’s effect on the way people mourn.

Share your story: Has someone close to you died from covid-19?

We might have to do without some of our favorite traditions in this 2020 holiday season, but there was one that I was determined to experience: a holiday cookie swap with friends.

With social distancing, the swap couldn’t involve inviting a big group of pals to the house to lay their trays of cookies out on the dining room table. Instead, a small group of us selected a batch of sturdy sweets and agreed to ship them on a certain date. Then, we gathered for a virtual cookie swap on Zoom.

We did our swap in late October as a test run so that we could share our tips with you as the height of holiday cookie season approaches. Here’s what we learned:

Pick a ringleader: You need a swap coordinator, who can help the group pick a reasonable deadline for choosing each cookie, collect addresses and select a shipping date with enough lag time — at least five to seven days — before the mutually agreed-upon virtual swap-party date.

Safety first: Coronavirus transmission by food is unlikely, experts say, but always remember to thoroughly wash your hands before, during and after cooking. You may wish to wear a mask or food-safe gloves as an extra layer of protection. If, however, you are sick, do not make food for others.

Think sturdy cookies: This is not the time for cream-filled confections or treats with delicate, soft frosting. Think dense bar cookies, biscotti or drop-style cookies, such as chocolate chip or oatmeal. Also, pick cookies that you know or think will taste good even when they’re several days old. And be sure the selected cookies are different enough from one another to provide variety. Imagine them together on a platter.

This article was originally published on Dec. 4.

A child died and two other people were seriously injured in a crash Wednesday morning in Fairfax County, officials said.

Fairfax County police said the crash involved two vehicles near Richmond Highway and Huntington Avenue. Some lanes were blocked as police investigated the collision.

Authorities said three people were taken to a hospital with serious injuries, including a child who died at the hospital.

Other details weren’t immediately available.