High School Football - Written 8/27/08

There’s something about football that separates it from every other sport. It’s endorphins and testosterone and adrenaline, but please don’t tell me it’s just teenage boy machismo because it’s so much more to me…Football is training camp and the hundred yard war and suicides and Hail Marys and 6 a.m. alarm clocks calling you to live football for 13 hours only to go home and study a playbook until you fall asleep and line calls and the “quickest two steps in America” and the love you feel for the guy next to you and the hate for the one across and scrimmages and film sessions and countless repetitions of “you make that block and it’s six” and Gerry Bertier and Mike Winchell and the fact that a class of physics students need half an hour to figure out the velocity and trajectory that an oblong, air-filled pig skin needs in order to fall into the hands of a receiver running away at 30 feet a second yet your QB knows the solution in a split second and eye black and ankle tape and wrist bands and the maniacal look in your teammates’ eyes in the locker room before the game and sunsets during warm-ups and bleachers slowly filling up like sand collecting in the bottom of an hour glass and hand held prayers and the thud of the first hit and everyone yelling in the huddle and halftime speeches and coverage adjustments and taking a knee to end it and bus rides home and the screaming thrill of victory and the echoing silence of defeat only interrupted by the hushed whimper of a 6 foot 4 250 pound 17 year old kid and sudden cramps and arm length bruises and the blood and the tears and the incredible feeling of fighting to get out of bed on Saturday morning because everything you have is lying in the grass and dirt 5 miles away.