Treacly Sean Taylor Post

Like probably most of you, before I begin work in the morning, I take a quick look at the news. Yesterday morning, I launched my Web browser to learn that the Redskins' best defensive player, Sean Taylor, had died of a gunshot wound suffered the day before. I'm not sure whether to be embarrassed to say this, but the news hit me harder than I would have thought. I was genuinely saddened and sort of depressed, feelings that didn't leave me all day.

At one point, I even felt an impulse to publicly acknowledge his death in some way, like with a brief note in my gmail status message or my myspace page (those distinctively mid-2000s ways of expressing yourself). Then I realized that I had never done this when people I actually knew died.

Like most people, I never met Sean Taylor. Like most people, I probably wouldn't have even recognized him if he were in the same bar or restaurant as me. But I'm not alone in feeling oddly distraught by his passing: an article in today's Washington Post recounts that hundreds of fans showed up at the Redskins' headquarters Monday night and Tuesday, first to pray for his recovery, then to mourn his death. These are people who took time off of work, school, time with their own family and friends, because they felt compelled to pay their respects to a stranger who, while undeniably a star, never transcended into celebrity status -- you rarely thought about Taylor after the game was over.

It struck me that four out of the five fans quoted in the article were roughly my age -- between 28 and 34. Maybe, as someone who grew up in the DC area in the 1980s, I am part of a generation with an unusually strong personal investment in this team. The Redskins were good -- among the NFL's premiere teams -- when we were young, and, with the Bullets perennially horrible and no baseball team in DC, had few competitors for our affection. Kids tend to embrace their favorite teams in unguarded, wholly irrational ways. I grew up with posters of Redskins players on my wall. When they lost the 1986 NFC Championship game to the Giants, I actually cried.

Maybe younger fans, not old enough to remember the last Super Bowl victory, never invested in the team the way we did, and maybe older fans are too old and cynical to mourn. But for us, Sean Taylor was one of the few players on the recent, mediocre Redskins teams good enough to remind us of the greats that used to grace our bedroom walls, and his death -- at an age younger than we are now -- strikes us in that kid-like, irrational part of our hearts that this team still occupies, a place that we have allowed to remain unguarded.