“[Redskins owner Daniel Snyder] came into the training room and he’s like, ‘You’re playing this week, right?’," Moss recalled last week on 106.7 The Fan Redskins beat reporter Craig Hoffman’s “Train with the Best” podcast when asked about his favorite Redskins-Cowboys memory. “I look at him like, uhhhh, nope.”

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“What do we have to do to get you to play?” Snyder replied, according to Moss.

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“I’m like, ‘I don’t know, man,’" said Moss, who was meeting with a personal trainer, masseuse and chiropractor twice a week by that point in his career to help take care of his body. “'It’s almost impossible right now.' And he’s like, ‘We need you out there.' And to hear your owner come to you like that, I was one of those guys, man. I played this game for a lot of reasons, but one of the reasons I played this game was to show my appreciation to everybody that had that confidence, or gave me the confidence, or even had enough in them to say, ‘This is my guy.’”

Moss became determined to play that week against Dallas. Trainers modified his right cleat by cutting out the heel area and inserting a plastic cup to provide extra padding.

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“It feels better, but that don’t mean it’s healed,” Moss said after practicing for the first time in two weeks, two days before the Cowboys game. “As long as the doctor says nothing else can hurt it, I’ve got to just try to gauge the pain. It’ll be what it is. We all play with a certain amount of pain. Today I did a lot on it. That showed me a lot of good signs."

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Moss took other steps to ensure he was able to take the field against Dallas.

“We came up with this concoction of [a] Toradol pill and some other kind of pill, and my remedy that I had for all the things,” Moss told Hoffman.

Moss’s remedy “for all the things” was a shot of Hennessy cognac, a pregame ritual that he and fellow former University of Miami stars Clinton Portis and Sean Taylor began partaking in the previous season.

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“Prior to the game, on our way, we would take a little shot,” Portis told NBC Washington’s Carol Maloney during an interview last fall about the 10th anniversary of Taylor’s death. “Not like going out and getting sloppy wasted; just adrenaline. You know, you take a shot and you were done with it. Me, Santana and Sean, we did this for a year and a half before anybody knew. We never told anybody. It was just, hey, here’s a little sip, bam, that was it.”

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Portis had told Taylor and Moss that he had one of his best games with the Broncos while he was hung over. Before a Week 4 game against the Jaguars in 2006, the trio took shots and then all played well in an overtime win.

“People talk about us sipping, and they talk about it for the wrong reasons,” Moss said. “I was doing it since college, but it was in track season that I first started it. So I was like, if I take this pill, that pill, and I get me a shot or two, I should be able to play. That was my remedy."

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Early in his career with the New York Jets, that combination, which a couple of his teammates referred to as “the glass eye,” helped Moss play through a high-ankle sprain. He hoped it would work again with Washington. At practice on Friday, Moss took his special concoction of pills, but without the shot of Hennessy.

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“I didn’t tell Dan [Snyder] about the drink, but I was like we can try these pills,” Moss said. “We got out there Friday and I limped around. I knew, deep down inside, if I take this shot [of Hennessy] before the game, it’s gonna kill all of that. I ain’t gonna feel that little limp."

On game day, Moss arrived early to test his heel on the Texas Stadium turf. He chased his pills and shot of Hennessy with bottles of Gatorade and water. Snyder approached Moss before kickoff and asked about his status.

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“Oh, I’m playing,” Moss said. “Let’s go.”

Moss caught nine passes for 121 yards and a touchdown in a 28-23 loss that dropped Washington to 5-5.

“I was in a zone like no other, man,” Moss said. “We could’ve won that game. If you see the highlight of the last drive of the game, Jason Campbell missed me in the back of the end zone on the same post route that I ran in ’05 to win the game. And if he throws the ball a little lower, I beat everybody. I got behind the safety and the corner, and he just threw it as tall as the damn goal post."

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Moss and the Redskins defeated the Cowboys, 27-6, in the final game of the regular season to clinch a wild card spot. It was Washington’s fourth consecutive win and their fourth victory in five games since Taylor was murdered in his home. The following season, more players began participating in the pregame shot ritual. Portis told Maloney that first-year Redskins Coach Jim Zorn assumed the shots were in honor of Taylor and asked players about the tradition during a team meeting.

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“And it bothered me when that happened, too, because we [were] doing it way prior to him getting here,” Moss said of Zorn. “So he spoke out about it — Hey, I hear you guys . . . you know that liquor is a downer? Don’t you feel down when you drink? And we’re like, ‘What is this conversation going to?’ And then I remember stepping out of the meeting room and he grabbed me, like, ‘Santana, are you one of those guys?’ And I think he wanted me to tell on everybody. And I said, ‘Coach, look here man, I don’t know about everybody else, but yeah, I’m that guy. But do you have a problem with my play?’”

Zorn didn’t have a problem with Moss’s play, but Portis said Zorn “lost the locker room” after the incident.

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(Listen to Moss’s entire interview with Hoffman here.)

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