Fred Bowen's "The Score" column,
January 4, 2008, Washington Post

When Sports Teams Bring Us Together

How about those Redskins?

After a wild, up-and-down season, the Washington Redskins are in the National Football League playoffs. The team overcame injuries to key players and a string of tough losses to squeeze out a winning season.

Of course, losing a game is nothing compared with losing a teammate. All-pro safety Sean Taylor was shot and killed five weeks ago at his home in Florida. A few days later, when the Skins lost a close game to Buffalo, no one gave them a chance to get to the playoffs. But Coach Joe Gibbs and his players didn't quit. They stuck together and won their final four regular season games. The Skins now will play the Seattle Seahawks tomorrow in the opening round of the postseason.

It seems that everyone is talking about the Redskins.

Can they make it to the Super Bowl? None of the teams in their conference is a world-beater. Washington defeated two of them, the Dallas Cowboys and the New York Giants, in the regular season. And the Skins played close games with two others, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Green Bay Packers. So Washington has shown that it can play any NFC team tough. I think the Skins have a real chance to go to Super Bowl XLII.

It's fun when the home team is fighting for a championship and everyone gets swept up in the excitement. Kids and teachers start wearing Redskins shirts to school. People put team flags on their cars. And the stores get quiet around kickoff time.

Maybe it's silly, but sports can bring people together. The games give all kinds of people -- young and old, rich and poor -- something to root for and care about . . . together.

I remember a summer long ago when my favorite baseball team, the Boston Red Sox, after being terrible for years, suddenly was battling for the American League pennant.

My family lived next to an older couple named the Lunders. Mr. Lunder was a grouchy guy who wore dark suits and drove a big, black car. Mr. Lunder might have been grouchy because my family had seven kids and our yard was filled with noisy games. Sometimes during these games balls flew over the fence into his yard, or kids hid in his bushes.

I hardly said anything but "good morning" or "good afternoon" to Mr. Lunder. Then one evening during that magical baseball summer, he saw me in the yard and said, "How about those Red Sox?" For the next half-hour, Mr. Lunder and I talked baseball. It turned out that he was much nicer than I thought, and he really knew his baseball.

So if you want to talk some football in the next 24 hours and you see a friend, family member or neighbor, just say . . . How about those Redskins?

Fred Bowen writes KidsPost's sports opinion column and is an author of sports novels for kids.

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