My Football Dreams

That they didn’t come true hasn’t made me bitter

Photo by Gene Gallin on Unsplash

This moment has remained frozen for me ever since fifth grade. Or more precisely, I see it as a series of stop/start/rewind action frames that ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit is famous for showing after a big play on the college football circuit.

My fifth-grade class, the winner of the fifth-grade playoffs, is facing the champions of the sixth grade — the big boys. It’s not that we don’t think we have a chance of winning; it’s just the reality that a year is a whale of a difference in boyhood frames. They’re longer than we are, and except for a few of us, they’re faster.

And, of course, their confidence is out there somewhere in the pathway between Venus and Mars.

The contest is played during the regular recess period — forty minutes or so of non-stop action. Our principal, James “Red” Howell, is refereeing. We’re supposed to have cheerleaders, too, including my fifth-grade girlfriend Mary Jane. But in a preview of the modern liberated world to come, Mary Jane and her friend Pam refuse to be cheerleaders. They don’t even come out to watch their boy-stars play at all, choosing instead to help our teacher clean blackboards and perform other miscellaneous classroom projects.