“I honestly really didn’t think I was going to be able to play in this game, but I just said screw it,” Spaight croaked in a merry locker room after Washington’s resounding 27-11 win. Gruden, he said, was “kind of messing with me, pushing my buttons. He knows I’m a fighter, man. It’d be the death of me before I missed a game and not be out there with my brothers.”

It’s easy to be cynical about this team’s predicament, especially after you have traded a Snickers bar for a $135 game ticket and then felt like you got swindled. The head coach has been publicly linked to another coaching job. The quarterback has been publicly linked to, like, 17 other quarterbacking jobs. Building some momentum for the future sounds great in theory, but you’d also have an awful lot of momentum if you were sledding off a cliff. It’s impossible to have a coherent thought about this future without knowing what colors Kirk Cousins will be wearing in September.

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But here’s one tiny, candied-fruit-sized bit of good cheer. When meaningless December games roll around, the Redskins crater. They embarrass themselves. They are mocked. They lose. Badly. And this time, they didn’t. They played through nausea. They were furious that the Broncos scored a late-game touchdown. They took care of their business, again.

Small victories, I know. (Super small.) Still, just listen to Cousins explain why these back-to-back home wins weren’t meaningless, the word most commonly affixed to them.

“I want this brand, this organization, to be associated with winning,” he said of the Redskins. “And when people around the league, and our fans that support this league, think about this organization, I want them to think of winners. I know 8-8 isn’t 13-3, but it also isn’t 7-9.”

The math checks out. And that the Redskins are now set up to finish at .500 — by beating the sorry New York Giants, the team that ended their playoff hopes in 2016 — is worthy of a (very) (extremely) (monumentally) modest smile.

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Remember, in their previous 15 seasons, the Redskins have started 5-8 or worse nine times. That’s made us all familiar with the contours of a good ol’ December death spiral. There is infighting. There are blowouts. The losses pile on top of each other. The emptiness in the stands is matched only by the emptiness of our souls. In those nine seasons, the Redskins have amassed a 7-20 record in their final three games. Three times, they lost their final three games. All three of those seasons were followed by coaching changes.

That was the future many of us imagined after the Redskins got pounded in Dallas and Los Angeles, extinguishing all postseason prospects and raising the glimmer of another nightmarish holiday season. That was when D.J. Swearinger said the team’s preparation wasn’t good enough, and when Trent Williams’s season ended, and when I started Googling recipes featuring lame duck. We imagined what’s now happening in Denver: Sunday was the Broncos’s eighth double-digit loss of the season, and it was followed by Brock Osweiler issuing passive-aggressive bon mots about how the pressure he faced Sunday was “completely out of my control.”

That’s the bottom. And for the Redskins, the bottom never arrived. Sure, the schedule helped. The Cardinals — last week’s opponent — are bad and started a bad quarterback. The Broncos are also bad and also started a bad quarterback. Both wins came at home. Neither was classically beautiful. But the Redskins punted on the embarrassment, at least for now. They avoided the death spiral. They got back to where they were supposed to be: average.

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This team’s Vegas over/under for wins was 7.5. It has seven wins entering its final game. After the heartbreak (in Kansas City and New Orleans), the face plants (in Dallas and L.A.), the injuries and criticism, the Redskins are where the conventional wisdom suggested they’d be: playing one last game, with a chance to reach .500.

“It’s an 8-8 league,” Swearinger said. “That’s not the goal, but it’s wjere we are right now, and that’s the goal for now.”

Parity has tended to avoid Washington. In the 13 seasons before Cousins was installed as the starter, the Redskins finished below .500 nine times, with a cumulative record of 82-126. That’s what I’d tell anyone who thinks there’s no difference between finishing 5-11 and 8-8, other than a better draft slot. When the cynics (hi!) pile on this organization, we cite the worst years, the biggest fiascos. This 2017 season is now safe from that list.

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“I mean, does it matter for the Super Bowl? No. Does it matter towards the goals that we set out for the team? Probably not,” Williams said when I asked if 8-8 was any better than 6-10. “We wanted to make the playoffs. We wanted to win the division, like everybody else does. But it definitely matters for the guys who are out there playing. … As a team, that leaves a good taste — a better taste — in your mouth.”

That’s not arguable. So unless you’re positive you wouldn’t be mocking this team for finishing 5-11, I don’t see how these December wins could be described as meaningless. Mediocre is a dirty word, but I can think of a few that are dirtier.

Again, that has nothing to do with the future, which was always going to be treacherous regardless of what happened this season. Chaos could arrive in the offseason, plus another exodus of unhappy fans, depending on the Cousins denouement. The players themselves will have little ability to shape that process. But they can win one more game and at least offer up the (barest) (scantest) (most meager) bit of comfort: a 3-0 finish and a .500 record.

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Is that better than the alternative? Look back at 2014 or 2013 or 2011 or 2009. Or just take it from Preston Smith.

“7-9,” he said, “is not better than 8-8.”