Party like it's 1992: The Washington Commanders are playing for a trip to the Super Bowl

State of play: One more win in the NFC Championship on Sunday against the repugnant Eagles from Philadelphia, and this team we've been right here waiting for since that song was popular will head to New Orleans for Super Bowl LIX on Feb. 9.

• Richmond, which for years hosted the team's training camp (maybe a little reluctantly), is going nuts over it. Bars, I'm told by your Axios Richmond reporters, were slammed last Sunday with those colors, people of all backgrounds high-fiving and hugging.
• My friends back home in southern Maryland are beside themselves. It's even consumed pockets of Charlotte, where I live now.

I just wish I could tell my granddad. He was the biggest fan I knew, and nobody came a close second. A season-ticket holder for three decades, he'd pull up early to every game, take his seat with a Miller Lite and watch the marching band perform in the pregame. "That's m'band," he'd say.

• The most enduring story of his fandom came five years before I was born, on Thanksgiving Day 1974. Washington lost to the hated Cowboys that day when a backup Dallas quarterback named Clint F***ing Longley (his full official name in my grandfather's eyes) led an improbable comeback and ruined the holiday.
• Granddad flipped over the table with a freshly cooked turkey on top and said, "Thanksgiving's off."

I have so much to tell him. Mostly about Jayden Daniels, the young man out of LSU who may be the best rookie ever to play the game.

• About the miracle Hail Mary Daniels threw against the Bears.
• About the Christmas present he delivered against the Eagles, and the incredible Washington Post headline afterward.
• And about how Joe Gibbs, the coach who led us to all those Super Bowls, was there for the most recent playoff win against the Lions, and summed up the rookie quarterback with one word: "special."

For most of us who grew up back then, "special" was what we thought all seasons would be. Forever.

• I have vague memories of wearing my first plastic burgundy and gold helmet on a January evening in 1983, when my parents took us to a Super Bowl party at their friend Carl Bowie's house, and can still hear what they sounded like when Riggins ripped off his run.

• Then, January 1988: Another Super Bowl party, this time in Joe Boswell's barn (for some reason I knew all of my dad's friends by both of their names). I won my first Super Bowl squares pool that night. $50. Not bad for an 8-year-old. Doug Williams did the rest.

• And January 1992, maybe the best team of them all, led by Mark Rypien. I have to say, there is no place like a middle school hallway the Monday after a local team wins a Super Bowl.

I was 12 then. I'm 45 now. The "always next year" years in between have been filled with mostly humiliation and sadness.

• One quarterback even ruined a touchdown by getting injured headbutting a wall.

Things got so bad in the 2010s that I quit watching. My mom and I were in the stands in 2013 when RGIII went down in the playoffs against the Seahawks. Granddad died later that year. My family gave up the season tickets a few years after that. We couldn't take any more of the owner, were repulsed by the drama, gave up on gameday traffic, and lost track of players we once rooted for.

• At some point I started saying it wasn't worth it, that I couldn't give up Sundays for this franchise when, "all I'm rooting for is the laundry."

But there I was again last Sunday night after the win over the Lions, smiling quietly in my living room while my kids were asleep, thinking of their great-granddad and craving a Miller Lite and a song.

Michael Graff is the Southern bureau chief for Axios Local, and like many 1980s kids from Maryland, is a die-hard Orioles fan who doesn't recognize the Ravens in any capacity.

Go deeper: Where to watch the Commanders vs. Eagles game in Richmond on Sunday.