dept. of dashed hopes, volume VI

I had given up on my boys long ago. After a decade and a half of dominance, they had slipped into a much discussed rut of mediocrity, and the problem was obvious, to me at least. The old ball coach had lost it, the game had passed him by, and the success he'd had in the early days with a team of overachievers who had to win with reckless abandon had transformed into stifling complacency with a blue chip bunch. Good enough to win a couple of national championships, sure, but they lost three others and should have played in five more (given a better kicker), they were that good.

Until they weren't. In fact, they had started to suck. They lost to the hated golden domers at home, and they suffered the ignominy of being shut out, at home, by weak forest. That was my personal nadir, when I no longer could bother to even care. They wouldn't play the quarterblack and they were determined to run an offense that was, offensively run by the coach's nitwit son and I just went cold noles. This was a very different feeling from the "I don't care anymore because we did it" feeling I had after the zenith of the undefeated, national championship season at the turn of the century. That was new millennium happiness, a change is gonna come, we've made it to the mountaintop excitement, and I told myself, if we never do this again, at least we did it once. I didn't expect to never even see the mountain range, much less go climbing up to the summit again.

Yet, I still watched, just not as fervently. And changes came, just not that quickly. The coach's son quit, and the new one played a few more players. We even had a quarterblack that might get in the game, even though he wasn't starting, as he should have been. Slowly, slowly. This year had been a good one, on paper at least. 6-1, leading their division, background noise about various title games. I knew better. I didn't think we'd win the next game, a pivotal one against a solid rival we'd dominated for years, decades even. Last loss was in 1975 for chrissakes. All that meant to me was, we're due. To lose, not recapture lost glory. So I watched with particular interest, and then, through a series of miscues and a general inability to stop the run, the score was 30-20 them and the fourth quarter was winding down. Season over, nothing to see here.

That's when the comeback started. The quarterblack came off the bench and instead of being used exclusively to run ("well, when they bring in Richardson we know they're going to run" noted the talking head), he goes play action and throws a deep pass. The starter can't actually pass the ball--by which I mean a tight spiral that whistles through the air. He delivers the ball, but it's USPS, not Fedex. This ball was pretty. It wanted to be caught. The wideout went up high and caught with his hands, not his body, and when he came down he was in the endzone. Go for two! Naturally. The starter's back in and he throws a fade to our resident sunday schooler, all 6'6" of him twisting and making a one handed catch that is unstoppable. It's a 3 point game. And their starter is bent over on the bench, next to the backup. The third string guy has to throw a pass, and it's picked off! All the momentum in the world is behind us. We drive down the field. I'm riveted. Phone calls are coming in from around the world to find out what's going on. "We're driving! We're running, we're passing, holy shit they even put in Richardson and let him throw the ball! It's epic!!!" I'm giving the play by play. We're in the redzone, time ticking down but totally in control. We have a great kicker, for once, and he's made a school record 15 straight. This is completely in his wheelhouse, but why settle for a tie? Let's win this baby!

And then it happens. My friend opens his mouth and says what I've been trying not even to think: "We can't have a stupid turnover here. No fumbles!"

"Dude!" I scream. "You can't say that! You can't even think that! That's like saying Beetlejuice's name three times or something, you just can't do it!!" I hear him knocking on wood.

It's too late. We're on the three. It's second and goal. The handoff goes to our fullback. A defender puts a helmet right on the ball and it goes airborne. There are three of our guys there when it comes down and for a fleeting second it looks like we've recovered for the winning score. But we haven't. They have. The game is over. Just like that. Those little hopes that I hadn't allowed to surface, which had just then been struggling up from the depths, drowned anew.

That one hurt. I'd laughed off some of the other ones, but that one really cut deep. The knife found its way into an old scar and once reopened, the skin there is so thin, the keloid of memory exposed, you know it's going to be a long time before it heals.