Yesterday, I found it difficult to write about Washington's loss over the weekend to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. It had nothing to do with the play on the field, which amounted to a carbon copy of the previous week's loss. Jason Campbell strove mightily to lead the team past their mistakes, only to be done in by mistakes of his own. A game changing moment came when the offense failed to obtain some badly needed short yardage in the shadows of their opponent's goal line--something that had already happened twice before this season. And a golden opportunity to improve their playoff standing, offered up by losses over the long weekend from Detroit, New York, and Arizona, was missed.

Obviously, what made even thinking about this stuff yesterday was the fact that Redskins safety Sean Taylor lay in a Florida hospital with a grievous wound to his femoral artery, a wound which proved mortal overnight.

Let's get on with the clumsily written part of this, then.

By all accounts, Taylor came into the league a troubled guy, but with the mentorship of defensive coach Gregg Williams -- who took Taylor in as he would a family member -- and the friendship of several close teammates, he had begun to turn himself around. According to what little has been written about Taylor's personal life, the birth of his daughter seemed to catalyze a desire to get on the path to redemption and responsibility. Earlier this year, Taylor remarked that he was getting paid "a king's ransom to play a kid's game" - a phrase that he did not coin but made significant strides to try to live by. Unfortunately, he leaves that life unfinished.

So, it's easy to sum up a game, hard to sum up a life. This is as it should be. And similarly, some degree of perspective should be sought, as Sean Taylor is just one of many who lost their lives to violent crime in the past 24 hours. There's a certain degree of fatuousness involved when a celebrity athlete's tragedy is held out for special attention against the many others whose relatively anonymous lives ended the same way. And, certainly, the cynical among us will read the statement of Taylor's lawyer Richard Sharpstein, “It’s just a sad senseless useless tragedy, an example of the incessant violence in this town and every other town in America,” as self-serving. But it's nevertheless true.

Washington will play Buffalo this weekend at FedEx Field. The team will likely come to the game fueled by an inspiration they'll wish they didn't have, and, win or lose, the game will be remembered for reasons they'd like to forget. At 5-6, this game is, at least on paper, a "must-win." But, really: let's not call it that.