At first, it looked like a laugher in progress. It ended as a nailbiter. In a slogging game punctuated by missteps and flukes, the Washington Redskins escaped with a win at home against the Arizona Cardinals. How’d Washington pull out the win? On balance, they just reaped slightly larger benefits from the errors, but credit some missed kicks and the strangest two-point conversion call I’ve ever seen for the victory. By and large, scoring opportunities…

By no means am I strictly an NFL guy. When the lights dim after the Super Bowl each year, I seamlessly move with the seasons into the maelstrom of college hoops and then the long, drawn-out, slow-motion marketing fantasia that is the NBA. Over a lifetime, I’ve soured on baseball but stayed constant to soccer, the sport I participated in myself as a child, with engrossingly mediocre results. But then, the NFL comes around again…

After the Washington Redskins and the Arizona Cardinals slogged their way through a first half that made an outright joke of the notion of professional athletics, Washington got even and then got over by a 17-13 score in a game that kept their razor thin playoff hopes alive. The first half was largely given over to a surreal orgy of turnovers, mutually engaged in by both squads. Mark Brunell offered up a trio of…