I want two things for the Dolphins. Yesterday meant almost nothing for one of them, but meant everything for the other. Yeah I want a championship. That’s one. Yesterday didn’t matter much for that. One game, yadda yadda. But the championship isn’t my end-all. More what I want is an end to a seemingly endless cycle of football purgatory where fans rarely have any real reason to think the Dolphins can compete, and on those rare occasions when they do have a rational reason for expectations, the franchise finds a way to eviscerate them in the most spectacular way possible. Cycling the HC job between big name disappointment, mediocre hard-ass understudy to the big name disappointment, and the next “QB whisperer”(preferably one who rode the coat tails of a future Hall of Fame QB) is so exhausting and demoralizing. I don’t know how they finally got it right with Mike McDaniel, whether it’s dumb luck or whatever, but yesterday sealed for me that they DID get it right. They have a head coach with a penchant for engendering respect from players and peers, whose schematic problem solving is the unexaggerated envy of the league. It’s a nice bonus that he’s not a jerk, in an industry full of jerks. At some point defenses will find a way to zig to his zags. That’s just the way the league is. But he’s shown himself good enough to keep evolving new answers to new problems, while empowering the players to be the stars of the show. I suppose yesterday solidified a lot of that, especially when you consider McDaniel is 40 years old, can’t be stolen via promotion, and isn’t about to leave the conference for the SEC or something like that. We’ve entered another long era in franchise history where fans can breathe a little easier, hope a little more, and take each season as it comes. That’s worth as much to me as a championship.