Every Tuesday, the crew from Redskins Broadcast Network takes over Gordon Biersch in Tysons Corner to film Redskins Late Night. There's a player co-host, a whole bunch of fans, and it's a generally good time. Everyone has fun, the crowd cheers at the right spots, but it doesn't really get particularly loud.

This week, though, things turned sort of lively when Jason Campbell and host Chris Paul tried to record a promo for the show (which airs at 1:30 Sunday morning on NBC-4).



I happened to be standing just behind the cameraman while this was being filmed, and the "We Want Dallas" cheer was completely spontaneous -- and also chill-inducing. Which led me to believe that watching a few more "We Want Dallas" videos might be a good way to get fired up for Sunday's game.

Every game the Redskins win, special teams coach Danny Smith awards a "Hit Stick" to the player who delivered the most crushing shot on special teams coverage. The stick -- which is an actual carved piece of wood that Smith acquired in Jamaica -- then lives with that player until the next time it's given out, sort of like a smaller-scale, woodier Stanley Cup.

Can you guess who got the Hit Stick this week? Hint -- it's the person who said the following: "We have a Hit Stick every week that everyone's trying to get. So guys like H.B. [Blades], me, Mike [Sellers], Chris Wilson, are always trying to make that hit. And this week happened to be my number."

So obviously it's not Blades, Sellers, or Wilson (although you can read an entertaining account of Wilson's time last year with the Hit Stick over at the DC Sports Bog). Here's another hint:



Okay, that was less a "hint" than a "video of the Hit Stick-winning play," but whatever. Lorenzo Alexander is your Hit Stick winner this week for the hit that nearly sparked a riot at Tuesday's charity event.

"Danny's always preaching 'Same foot, same shoulder, more power,'" Sellers said about the play. "Well, in Lamont Jordan's case, that didn't work out too well." (Sellers claims that he "got tired of" winning the Hit Stick and leaves that stuff to guys like Alexander now.)

Rock Cartwright was also a fan of Alexander's hit. "I watched it on film here AND I watched at home," Cartwright said. "That was a MAMMOTH of a hit. It was crazy, because all I heard was a 'BOOM,' like somebody shot a gun or something. Next thing you know I see Devin [Thomas] jumping around, and I see Lamont Jordan on the ground. That was a big time hit."

There's probably some kind of mathematical equation describing how the rowdiness level of room increases as you add teenage boys per square foot, but I don't know the specific math of it. What I do know, after Tuesday's Washington Redskins Charitable Foundation 4th & Life High School Football Forum at FedExField, is that roughly a thousand high school upperclassmen football players squeezed into a relatively confined space = a lot of rowdiness.

The 4th & Life program -- sponsored by Coca-Cola, fact fans! -- is, in essence, a forum for current professional football players to impress upon high school football players just how important education is, and just how ephemeral a football career can be. Tuesday, it was Lorenzo Alexander, Kevin Barnes, Malcolm Kelly, and Brian Orakpo.

They each addressed the students -- who were from all over Maryland, Virginia, and the District -- and then took questions in a Q&A format. Alexander, as the senior player, also served largely as the emcee of the event, but it was Kelly's story that best exemplified the kind of message the players were trying to convey.

"I came in ballin' during training camp [in 2008]," Kelly said. "Middle of training camp, right before preseason's gettin' ready to start, I'm in the starting rotation. Me, Santana Moss, and Antwaan Randle El. I go out there in practice, I was walking back from the huddle -- not out there running around, not out there jumping up and landing funny; I was walking back to the huddle -- I felt my knee give out, I fall to the ground.

"So just like that, it can be over. It can be done with. Luckily, I was able to rehab it and come back, and be able to fight for the number two spot or whatever. But it can be taken away, man, just like that. So you really gotta take advantage of your oppontunities.

"I never really listened to people talk about all that education stuff; I just let it go in one ear and out the other. But at the end of the day, that's the only thing that's guaranteed. That's the only thing that somebody cannot take away from you, man. What you know. The knowledge in your head, nobody can ever take that away from y'all."

And that was a message that the players successfully brought across to a rowdy, fidgety, boisterous crowd of young men, not all of whom seemed to be exactly listening. Which came to a head, when -- strangely -- Lorenzo Alexander was fielding questions.

In some ways, any rivalry is by definition about nostalgia. It's about the accrual of loathing for a specific opponent over a number of years. Without that -- without the memory of a few heartbreaking losses, a few dominating wins, a few extracurricular events -- you don't have a rivalry at all. You just have what the Redskins used to have with the St. Louis Cardinals when the Cardinals were in the NFC East: a team you play a lot.

So here's a bit more Dallas Week nostalgia for you. For me, Pat Summerall will always be the TV play-by-play voice of these games. The NFL On CBS music brings back early '80s NFC games. The vaguely greenish tint of the video reminds me of what the screen picture actually looked like in the days before HDTV.

Meaning? This is the intro to a Week 15 game between 12-2 teams who had faced off in the previous year's Conference Championship game. Extracurriculars? The game that follows this intro would end as a 31-10 Redskins win, which would frustrate the Cowboys to the point that they broke up the then-traditional Fun Bunch end zone high five. So, yeah, this says rivalry to me as much as anything could, even if it does say nostalgia just as emphatically.

We'll get to the part where kicker Shaun Suisham WAS happy in a bit, but this story starts elsewhere: Suisham had read on some obscure blog somewhere that Hunter Smith had no intention of throwing him the ball on the touchdown play that ultimately went to Mike Sellers, and he was not pleased.

"I talked to Hunter about that, because I wasn't happy," Suisham told me today, trying very hard to look stern and serious. "I left him a voicemail. My wife told me it was on the website. After further discussion, he says he was joking, and he was hoping the tone came through in the article. So we settled that, and I'm okay with it now."

The way Carlos Rogers' day went on Sunday, it seemed reasonable to be ask if he would be playing again at all. After getting scorched for a 75 yard touchdown pass, Rogers was pulled from the game and did not return. Depending on how the situation with the collective bargaining agreement develops, Rogers may be an unrestricted free agent next season, and there were some who were suggesting that this marked the end of Rogers' tenure in Washington.

But that's not the way he sees it, and it doesn't sound like the way his position coach sees it either.

It's Dallas week, and thanks to the win at home on Sunday, it actually feels like it matters. Over at the Redskins.com mothership, the estimable Larry Weisman has composed a nice retrospective of the Redskins/Cowboys feud; it's worth reading as a whole, but here's the section that stuck out for me:

Back in the early 1980s, before the Cowboys began their slide into mediocrity, Dallas Week roused the D.C. area. A radio station went so far as to print dart boards with a picture of [then-Dallas head coach Tom] Landry covered by concentric target circles – don't doubt me, I still have one on my desk.

And it was. I borrowed it and scanned it to share with all of you. Weisman tells me it was distributed with a dart, and if you click the picture for a larger image, you can see the holes where the dartboard was actually used.


Weisman can't be sure, but told me he thinks the radio station doing the handouts was 107. Given the timeline and the number, it had to be Q107, one of the great pop music stations of my childhood. Which is really only relevant for two reasons:

Ah, remember the glorious days of the first half of the 2008 Redskins season? There was always a reason to vote for some Redskins player or coach to win some sponsored league honor, from the sublime (Chris Horton, NFL rookie of the month!) to the merely entertaining (EVERYONE for the Pro Bowl!).

This year, those occasions have been sort of thin on the ground. Shockingly, there just aren't as many positives about a 3-6 team. But this week, that all changes: the Hunter Smith to Mike Sellers touchdown has been nominated for Sprint Can't Miss Play Of The Week.

And I think, no matter how frustrated you may be with some things about the team, that we can all agree on one simple fact: when you motion out of field goal formation into shotgun, then roll the punter right while sneaking the fullback left along the line, then have the punter put nearly fifty (diagonal) yards in the air to him for a momentum-swinging touchdown ... well, every time that happens, it's worth voting on for Play of the Week.

So go vote at NFL.com/fans -- polls are open until 3 p.m. Saturday.

Ah, it feels just like the good old days.

When I talked to new Redskins running back Quinton Ganther late last week, one of the questions that I asked him was who he compared his running style to. "You watch, then you can tell me," he told me at the time. It was an uninteresting enough exchange that even I left it out of the post.

After watching him during his limited action in Sunday's game against the Broncos, I feel safe comparing Ganther's running style to a compact lead ball rolling downhill. Probably his most notable play -- the one embedded above, courtesy of Redskins Broadcast Net -- was the eighteen yard catch-and-run that ended with him taking on one of the NFL's great safeties in Brian Dawkins ... and pretty much getting the better of the collision.

Because I hadn't seen the finish of the play clearly from the press box but had heard it about it via Twitter, Iasked Ganther in the postgame locker room if he had actually run over Brian Dawkins. "Something like that," he said, chuckling.

Even before the team won on Sunday, it felt to me like there was a sense in the air of setting things right and balancing accounts, like a much-less-violent version of the end of the Godfather. The changing of the sign policy, for example, putting an end to that long-simmering frustration.

But a less-remembered bit of 2009 Redskins awkwardness was revisited on the pregame sidelines, and set just as solidly to rest. Before the Redskins/Patriots preseason contest this year, Mike Sellers carried the American flag during player introductions and unthinkingly threw it aside. This caused a bit of a stir, Sellers apologized, and that seemed to be that.

Sunday, lifelong Redskins fan U.S. Army Staff Sargeant Brian Havens presented the Redskins organization with a flag that his unit flew during their deployment in Afghanistan, and it was Sellers that accepted. Somewhere in my head, that drew the final line under any negative associations between the words "Sellers" and "pregame" and "American flag."

And for Sgt. Havens, it was just a complete thrill.