Sacked!
I jumped up and down and screamed, not anything intelligible, just yelling. The other Woodsmen were slapping his back and the stadium announcer told us all that it was a sack by rookie Ronan Wilder.
“That’s only the first one!” Ed hollered at me, and we jumped together.
I didn’t care much when the offense came out—it would have been good for them to do a better job, but whatever. At the end of the first half, the Woodsmen were down by three because the defense had allowed only a single field goal. I was trying to count up all the great things that Ronan had done, like the tackles and the pressure on the quarterback, the time he’d batted down a pass, or how often he’d mowed over the offensive tackle who had faced him.
I could watch it again because I was recording this at my apartment. Right now, I sat in the orange seat and took a breath as the Woodsmen went into the locker room.
“That was a good half for the defense,” Ed told me, and he knew specifics about why. I paid attention like I’d done with myteachers in high school and professors in college so that I could learn even more. I wanted to know everything about football.
He was happy to explain the intricacies and we stayed in our seats through the halftime show with the Wonderwomen dancers and some kids from a local team whom the Woodsmen were honoring. That would have been a good idea for the Juniors, too—why not pair up with youth teams and run camps during the Woodsmen season? Or maybe the Junior Woodsmen could have taken part in a halftime show here at the stadium? I made a few notes in my phone about how to pump up their presence and I made more notes on what Ed was telling me.
But then the second half started. The Woodsmen offense was a lot better, since there was a different quarterback. He had also made the roster from the Junior Woodsmen, and that should have gotten more publicity for the team, too. Anyway, he did a good job but I still didn’t totally take notice of what was happening on the field until the defense came out.
They played another guy instead of Ronan.
“This is ridiculous,” I told Ed. “Don’t they want to win? Isn’t victory their objective?”
“In the preseason, they want to see a lot of guys in action,” he started to tell me, but I still thought it was dumb. If you knew that someone was better, then you should have stuck with him and not messed around with other people. When I was in college and was running for president of the Entrepreneurs’ Club—
No, I knew that Ed was right. I sat back and watched Ronan’s replacement do ok, not great. Things were certainly not going aswell on that side of the field as they had during the first half. Our opponents’ run game picked up and the quarterback had a lot more time to think about and complete his passes without that pressure from the defensive end. But our offense picked up, too, so as the clock ran out?
We were all screaming again, because the Woodsmen had won their first preseason game. We watched as the players mingled with the other team (Ronan knew one of them from college so they hugged and from what I could see, they had a short conversation). “Ok,” I said as he went to the locker room, and I breathed out. Everyone in my office was always talking about how much they enjoyed coming to the games, but I wouldn’t have called that experience “fun.” It had been tense, definitely, and the ending had been satisfying. I had been unhappy with the defensive coaches’ strategy but maybe they’d figure things out for the next game.
Ed had stood and I did, too, and we shuffled toward the exit with the rest of the crowd. Due to being up so high, there were a lot of people ahead of us and it took a while to get out of the building. Then he said goodbye and went off toward his car, and I went to the employee parking lot where I’d left mine. Before I got in, I texted Ronan and told him that he had been wonderful.
“I was so impressed,” I wrote but I knew that I’d been more than that. I’d been scared the whole time he’d been out there that he would get hurt and oddly, I also worried that he might hurt someone else. Ronan was so big that you could have thought he was mean, too, but he wasn’t. I thought that he would have felt terrible if he’d injured a guy on the other team.
He wrote back to me before I could express any of that. “The sole reason I went out for the Woodsmen was to impress you and I’m glad it worked. Are you coming over?”
I hadn’t been planning to but immediately answered “yes.” He explained that I’d be waiting for a while and that was ok because I had things to do. I went into my office and worked for a moment, solidifying all the ideas I’d had about the Junior Woodsmen and then placing an order at the Woodsmen fan site. I was now a fan, after all.
By the time I was done, traffic had cleared a lot. Ed had clued me in on the fact that everyone in our area listened to the Woodsmen post-game radio broadcast by two guys who were, apparently, older than Lake Michigan and were also the biggest Woodsmen partisans on the planet. I had heard them interviewing people as I’d worked at my desk and I listened more while I was in the car on the way to Ronan’s house.
I waited anxiously for him to arrive there, too, and the moment he opened his door, I jumped up from my chair to tell him the news I’d heard. “Herb and Buzz called you an eager beaver with moxie!” I told him, and he froze.
“They did?”
“They did!” I confirmed. My excitement after hearing them talk about him hadn’t decreased. I had almost driven into a ditch when Herb had first said his name. “They said you’re full of get-up-and-go and they’re fired up to see you play again. Do you know what that means?”
Ronan joined me in the kitchen and put down his keys and bag. “If I’m being honest, not entirely.”
“It’s really good! It means that Ed and I aren’t the only ones who thought that you were amazing. The whole world thinks so. It’s a general consensus.”
“Yeah? The world was watching?”
He wasn’t taking this seriously enough. I crossed the kitchen and reached up to put my hands on his shoulders. “You were wonderful. You were the best one on the field, on either side. I knew you could do it but seeing it like that…” I wasn’t usually at a loss for words, but I found myself shaking my head and unsure of how to describe it. “I guess I was proud.”
“Well.” He smiled. “That’s a nice thing to say.”
“It’s dumb, because you were the one who did it. You should be proud, not me.”
“We could both be proud.” He took my hands from his shoulders and put them around his neck, which made me hug him. I didn’t mind. “We could be proud and happy.”
“I’m both,” I said.
He settled his arms around me. “So am I. That was the best night of my life.”
