The Hunt for Red October: the Improbable Rising of the Tide at Lincoln High School
Renaissance /ˌrɛn əˈsɑns/
a renewal of life, vigor, interest;rebirth; revival
Some places never really leave you. Even if you’re miles and a dozen years and 2 kids and a 401(k) removed, there’s a lingering piece of you that still connects, something that still sparks in your bloodstream when you think about somewhere that means something.
That’s the way I feel about Lincoln High School.
There’s that extra synapse that fires when I meet someone who also went to school there, a humming somewhere in the Limbic system of my brain like the vibrato of a guitar string as I scroll my mental timeline back at least 12 years.
As you grow older, there’s a tangible realization that the proximity of one’s body matters a lot less than the proximity of one’s heart. My body has been both near and far from the place I used to call my second home, but my heart has rarely been more than a block or two away, down the winding blacktop of Capitol Parkway.
When I speak to other graduates, sharing the auditory secret handshake of our own little club, I’ve come to find that I’m not the only one that feels this way about the school we affectionately called “The High”.
In early June of 2005 I walked across a stage in the now-defunct Pershing Auditorium, received my diploma and tossed my red and black tasseled hat into the air. I whooped and elaborately high-fived and probably did some dumb things with some of my dumb buddies and we rode off into the collegiate sunset. I was done with Lincoln High School.
That was 12 years ago.
It was 13 years ago, when Donald Trump wasn’t firing cabinet members but reality contestants and I was still driving my Grandfather’s 1992 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera (*Author’s note: RIP, “The Cut”),
that the Lincoln High football program had just punched their ticket to state football.
The details are a little hazy and hard to track down, but I do remember writing about it as the school newspaper’s Sports Editor — a predominantly made up title that I stumbled into and immediately made a mess of — and that it was a hard-scrabble team that managed to win the district to get to 5–4 on the year before they bowed out in the first round of the playoffs.
But, somewhere between that final game in the crisp fall air of 2004— one so full of reckless, youthful promise and hope — and the 2015 season, things went very wrong. In fact, just about everything went wrong.
Here’s what the next 10 years of football looked like for the program at Lincoln High School.
That’s 14 wins. And 76 lossses.
When I did the math for this, at first, I was certain I had hit the multiplication key inadvertently while doing the basic stuff.
If you’re a statistician, that’s a .155 winning percentage for a solid decade.
That’s three head coaches, various assistants, and innumerable young men with talent — you see, speed and raw athleticism have never truly been the issue at a place like Lincoln High but harnessing those qualities is another story altogether — who all came up short.
And not in the snakebitten, cursed way of teams who just miss.
No. This wasn’t the early ’90s Buffalo Bills.
It wasn’t a missed field goal to put them over the top or a tipped pass that achingly soared over the hands of the intended receiver. This was the Cleveland Browns. This was moribund. This was the kind of unmarked casket buried in the shallow sports grave that is whispered about, by the pallid glow of our digital campfires.
And it couldn’t be effort, because what high school kid wants to lose? And it could just be coaching because, along the way, there were several different attempts at rebooting the system. And, it couldn’t just be any one particular thing. Because to lose this badly for this long? Answers don’t come easy and the only questions asked are bound to be rhetorical.
The short answer: no one really knew.
But, in 2015, a year removed from 2014's 1–8 season that saw the team get outscored 108–265 in nine games, there was a pulse.
In 2016, more than that: “Lincoln High School, playoff team.”
We said it out loud or messaged it to our far flung friends, that shared spark in the canyons of our brains suddenly lighting up like flint-striking-flint. Yeah, that sounded pretty damn good after 11 long, cold, nuclear-winter-bleak years.
You know in horror movies when the virginal babysitter thinks that she’s finally killed that horrible, mask-wearing, bogeyman from the closet? When the monster’s been shot 7 time in the chest and stabbed and run over by the car that wouldn’t start for the first 11 tries while the heroine sobbingly struggled with the keys? When the camera suddenly zooms in on his hand and you see the fingers start to twitch? And that death-black synthesizer kicks on and you know that it’s not over, even if it should be?
That’s 2017.
It’s here. They’re here. We’re here.
In this year, two thousand and seventeen, Lincoln High school football has clawed their way out of that eight by six foot hole of mausoleum dirt and cyclical struggle and terminal teeth grinding fatigue and is somehow alive.
It’s October again and the Lincoln High Links are, appropriately, zombies.
They’re undead.
They’re terrifying and dominant and inescapably badass, with nothing to lose and a horde of wild-eyed, George A. Romero style desperate fans at their backs, they now find themselves a single game away from going undefeated for an entire regular season.
They’ve got more wins in this season than the program did from 2005–2011.
Combined.
They’re not the Browns anymore. They’re not even the Bills.
This year? They’ve been playing like the Patriots.
All of those stats that I dry-heaved out onto this post from earlier? Imagine if you took those and suddenly did a 180 degree turn. In fact,it’s more like a 540. Because, here is how this season has gone thus far:
They have scored 389 points to their opponents’ 93.
That’s 48 points per game, while allowing only 11.
Their junior QB, Cedric Case, has thrown for 325 ypg, 33 TDs and 2 ints.
They’ve got the #3 scoring offense and the #2 scoring defense in Class A.
If you’re looking for a weak link in the chain, it’s that they haven’t had much of a challenge yet. Their opponents sport a combined record of 21–43 and the closest game for the Links was a 27-point victory over Lincoln Southwest to win the city championship.
But when it comes to adversity? While this team may not have a lot of experience to draw on, this place — long shrouded in the fetid miasma of perennial losing — and these people: they have plenty to share.
Make no mistake, there can be no Renaissance without the dark ages.
This Friday, Lincoln high school has a chance to go undefeated in the regular season and move to 9–0 entering the postseason with that inescapable gravitational pull of momentum that can be so hard to describe, but is felt somewhere in the small intestines.
This Friday, they have a chance to be the best team this school has seen for as far back as Google is willing to take me.
This Friday, these young men who have defibrillated a school and a program and a recklessly impassioned alumni fanbase, who have furnace-burned the past in a combustion engine to propel them to this moment will face their biggest test yet. They will be playing the highly rated, highly motivated 1-loss Millard West Wildcats for the district title and a chance to slingshot themselves into the state playoffs.
That past, so ghoulish and hallucinatorily bad: it doesn’t matter.
Not in 2017. Not this Friday.
This Friday, when the Links look over their shoulders, they won’t see years of sand-blasted bleakness. They’ll just see us.
This Friday, my body and my heart will be back at the place I used to call my second home.
This Friday: I’ll be there.
You should be too.
