By December, the Redskins were competing for a division title. Cousins was threatening all sorts of franchise passing marks. Griffin had become a fixture on the inactive list, more a fleeting memory than a contributor on this team. And so when Okeowo found himself surrounded by cheering FedEx Field throngs roaring “You Like That!” in unison, why wouldn’t he add his voice to the chorus?

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“I had no choice,” he said with a laugh Sunday afternoon. “I mean, I felt like I didn’t want to be that outlier. The fans were behind it, we were winning games — I should at least be able to enjoy this and appreciate it. … This season has made no sense. It just has made no sense. It’s been a strange trip.”

Not just for him, either. This fanbase, so noisily divided over the summer, now finds itself staring at three shattered division rivals, a statistically brilliant quarterback and an upcoming home playoff game. Calling this “a surprise” hardly conveys the wonderment; it’s like shoving your way onto a Metro train at rush hour and discovering a gleaming kitchen passing out free bowls of chili, plus cheese samples. And so several of the skeptical fans who told me in September they would be fine with failure are in the same position as Okeowo: chanting for a player, and a team, they had so publicly doubted.

“All the time — I love it, man, I love it,” Barry Cohen said on Sunday. “Once I realized that Griffin was absolutely not going to play all year, that was the only choice: just get on board.”

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“Of course, absolutely, I’m right there with the crowd,” said Harry Fox, a one-time Cousins doubter who recently bought his son a “You Like That” t-shirt. “I was completely convinced that we didn’t have our franchise quarterback on the roster. To my surprise and my delight, I was completely, 100 percent wrong.”

“After trashing the guy big time, it’s weird,” admitted Ankit Mittal. “But you get into the emotion of the season. I’m not going to take my pride over the team. If the team is playing well, I don’t care if I look like a dummy.”

If you listened to sports radio or glanced at social media for even 15 minutes this season, you know how combustible the past four months have been. When Cousins played well, his supporters — including much of the local media establishment — would congratulate each other on how correct they had been. (Shhh. If you listen closely, you can probably hear them right now.) After every Cousins mistake, his doubters — including this columnist — would surface, suggesting he might never rise above mediocrity.

It sometimes felt like wins and losses were less important than which camp was currently winning this civil war, that games were just a three-hour prelude to the next week of arguments. The Jets game? Told ya, he’s a bum. The Bucs comeback? Told ya, he’s a gem.

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The last five or six weeks have been different. Cousins threw 19 touchdowns to two interceptions in the season’s second half. He finished with one of the best passer ratings in the league, won Washington’s second division title of the century and gradually began convincing a skeptical national audience. (He also convinced me. I was super-duper wrong. Now maybe the e-mailer who keeps demanding I apologize will be happy.)

Some of the doubters I talked to in September had planned on retreating a bit from their fandom, to not invest as much emotional bandwidth into a team that kept offering disappointment and chaos. Success made that harder.

“I have to admit the Redskins sucked me back in, like they always do,” wrote Julie Merkin, who had pledged an emotional withdrawal. “I think I made it a whole three weeks without watching a game. Then I spent several weeks telling people that I’d be impressed when they played two good games in a row. Then they did. Then I finally allowed myself to get excited.”

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“I caught the fever. Whether that’s being a fair-weather fan to some extent, maybe. But I caught the fever right around the time the team started playing well and putting up points,” said Nithin Kuchibhotla, who was also leaning toward indifference in September. “It’s not hard for me to get back on board, and say, ‘Alright, I remember why this team causes me so much emotion in the first place.’ ”

Some of the fans who were so skeptical of Cousins and Gruden said they had scaled back their usual in-season habits, even as they celebrated Washington’s triumphs. Sheri Bangura used to read every article she could find and watch every press conference. That ended this year. She isn’t sure if it will ever resume.

“There was so much — and there is still so much — dissension, that it was like, ‘Okay, I have to take a step back, this is upsetting me,’ ” she told me. “I like this way a little better. I get to keep my sanity. And honestly, it keeps me rooting for the team overall as opposed to looking deeply into individual performances and how individuals are treated.”

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For others, the joy never really returned. One Cousins skeptic wrote that this has been “an interesting opportunity to take a step back and not be completely and irrationally in the moment every Sunday,” that even though he still watches every game, he still cannot support Gruden. Another, Justin Wilder, said that a variety of factors led him to invest more energy into other Washington sports teams, and less in the NFL.

“It’s been painful in a way to not watch them the way I used to even last year, but I just can’t,” he said. “I’ve been watching the results come in and seeing the wins rack up and been baffled by it, and I kind of realized that I’d be hearing from you again when they clinched. It’s good for the town; I just can’t get behind it. I don’t feel any emotion about it. If they win it all, that’s fine. I just won’t feel the same happiness I would have felt last year or two years ago.”

There’s no easy way to summarize or explain all of this. Many of these folks still have fond feelings for Griffin, whose playoff run in 2012 seemed to cause more unrestrained joy than this year’s surprise dash. Many of them said they will continue to wish Griffin well after he leaves Washington, and none of them thought Cousins deserved to be caught in this crossfire. Many said they will be hesitant to embrace any player in the future the way they fell for Griffin. And yes, many of them have received months of ribbing and grief from family and friends.

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Okeowo’s friends have been “crushing me all year,” he said. They sent him texts and tweets every time Cousins played well. They mocked his conviction that it would be better for the Redskins to implode than to finish in the middle of the pack. He still isn’t looking into Super Bowl tickets — after 2012, he favors caution — but he was happy to take the abuse.