“You look good, you play good,” Brian Orakpo told me after the first golden game. “We looked clean out there, man; we looked real nice.”

“I love ’em, man,” LaRon Landry said.

“A new, fresh look,” Lorenzo Alexander said.

“All of a sudden the ‘Skins have one of the best home looks in the league,” Uni Watch’s Paul Lukas wrote.

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This wasn’t controversial. Those pants were new, and fresh, and clean; all words that went along with the new Mike Shanahan era, which would sweep away the stale two-year blip of Zornism. It all felt different, and different felt good.

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(This wasn’t Shanahan’s doing, incidentally. “If I start making decisions on what color jerseys we wear, they should shoot me,” he once told me. “You know, I’m not even sure who decides it.”)

Either way, things soon went south, in a gushing golden geyser. Shanahanism ended worse than had Zornism. Robert Griffin III seemed ready to define the gold-pants era, but then he flamed out, and the fanbase began devouring itself. Also, the Redskins kept losing, and losing, and losing — one of their worst stretches in decades.

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As of this writing, since 2009, the Redskins have a regular-season record of 25-50 in those gold pants. Yup, 25-50! That’s not a small sample size. When people see those pants now, they associate them not with something new and fresh and clean — or with a cool nod to the past — but with sustained losing, and one of the most deflating eras in Redskins history. Maybe, in other words, it’s time for a change.

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The burgundy pants that the Redskins wore on Sunday — “championship pants,” according to Doc Walker — made people happy. “Bringing it back to the old school days,” Pierre Garcon wrote on Instagram before the game with a photo of the Fun Bunch. “We gotta wear those pants at home now,” Duke Ihenacho wrote on Twitter after the game. And no one was happier than Walker.

“They had the white tops on and the burgundy bottoms,” Walker said on ESPN 980 Monday morning. “Fifty-three men together, with white tops and burgundy bottoms, cannot lose. All I could think of was that 12-year span of excellence, and it was like a throwback. I thought we were in the Meadowlands. Really, everything about it — it was just such a wild adventure for me, personally. Because I was shocked. When I saw that, I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ because that uniform, we don’t get it for Homecoming. For whatever reason, it’s not the soup of the day for this group. But it is for me. And when I saw that, I said, ‘Oh my God.’ And then when we started pounding that rock, and when we got out of our ‘creative’ mode and got into mano a mano, in their backyard, dude, it was priceless. ”

(Worth noting: Washington’s record in all sorts of pants has been bad in recent years. According to Post research, since 2009 the Skins are 3-1 in those weird dark throwback pants, 5-9 in white pants and now 8-14 in burgundy pants. Maybe they should just try blue pants. Or short pants. Or no pants.)

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The point is, the burgundy pants no longer remind people of missteps over the past 10 or 15 years. They’ve been used spottily enough that they now remind people instead of the best era in team history, and of the three Super Bowl wins, all of which came in those burgundy pants. You stay away from something for long enough, and it will start to look fresh again. Pair that with memories of a time when the Redskins carried an aura of success, and with our perpetual embrace of change, and this longing makes sense.

This, of course, is how it’s always been. It’s how it was back in 1979, when new General Manager Bobby Beathard decided it was time for a change — away from gold.

“I thought the uniforms were pretty drab, that they could be improved,” Beathard said at the time, noting that most of all, he “hated the gold pants with dark burgundy jerseys. … When you’ve been in the same thing for so long and you bring in something new, sometimes it perks people up.”

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Washington had worn gold pants at home for 18 straight seasons, some of which were fine and some of which were exceptional. But Beathard’s new era — which also included white pants — coincided with a decade of dominance.

My readers, by and large, were weaned on that era. Fans under the age of, say, 45 or so don’t have fond memories of the winning Redskins teams of the ’70s wearing gold. Gold instead means injured knees and infighting, anonymous leaks and three-win campaigns, jokes about hot dog colors and blowout losses. In a short period of time, gold pants got stuffed with a lot of baggage, most of it bad.

Which is why the response when the Redskins broke out the burgundy pants for the first time since the 2012 season was, as far as I could tell, nearly unanimous. Fans — at least the fans I interact with — were thrilled. And after the game, they lobbied with one voice: heed that thrilling comeback. Keep the mustardy pants in the fridge, at least for a little while. Let’s focus our memories on the one era that still sustains the beaten-down younger fanbase: the era that came in burgundy pants.

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“I’m expecting white shirts at home,” Walker said on Monday morning, rejecting the suggestion that this throwback should just be a road thing. “I’m expecting Bruce Allen to do the right thing again — because it’s all on Bruce. And if Bruce feels this and puts us in [burgundy pants], our home crowd will go berserk. Because that’s what they’re used to. They’re used to that.”

Indeed, just look at some of this response.

https://twitter.com/DebateWith0Hate/status/780177821377232896