The Washington Redskins and their fans thought they had made a last second comeback to tie last Sunday’s NFL game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. All they needed to do to send the game into overtime was to make the extra point,  the virtually automatic seventh point of a touchdown that is successfully kicked in the pros about 99% of the time. It wasn’t to be, however: the ‘Skins long snapper snapped the ball high, the holder couldn’t hold it, and the game was lost.

After the game, the holder, Redskins punter Hunter Smith, told reporters that it was his job to catch errant snaps, and that he took responsibility for the loss. “If anybody needs to lose their job it’s me,” he said in the locker room. “I certainly accept blame.”

Sure enough, the Redskins, who are having yet another in a long line of disappointing seasons, fired him.

Smith was at fault for the loss the way Bill Buckner was at fault for the infamous 1986 Boston Red Sox loss to the Mets in Game 6 of he World Series, when he let a Mookie Wilson dribbler go through his legs to score the final run in a winning, two-out, 9th inning rally. There were culprits galore in both losses, but Smith and Buckner got the brunt of the blame because their miscues came at the end of the games involved. If  Washington kicker Graham Gano hadn’t missed two easy field goals earlier in the Tampa contest, the missed point wouldn’t have mattered. (Gano has the most missed field goals in the NFL this season.) If the young long snapper, Nick Sundberg, hadn’t botched the snap, Smith would have had an easier catch to make. Smith has every reason to believe that he is being made the scapegoat for a team loss that made a frustrating season more so.

He refuses. On a D.C. radio sports show, he said,

“I don’t want to make this too serious — we are talking about football here — but it is a moral duty on some level to tell the truth and to take responsibility. And I won’t go off too much on my values and things like that, but I believe that I’m a part of a generation, really, the Lawsuit Generation. Everything is somebody else’s fault. People that are my age — and a little younger, and a little older — want to blame somebody else, and they tend to want to self-protect. And I really reject that as a pattern of behavior, and as a pattern of morality. It’s not how I’m going to live my life. When I make a mistake, I’m going to own up to it. And really, that’s kind of what all this comes down to.”

That, my friends, is what accountability looks like. I had almost forgotten.

And the really amazing thing is, he’s in Washington, D.C.!