The Feeling of Knowing you Paralyzed Someone
We hear clicking cleats on concrete as the other team walks toward our football field. They already look defeated. They know they’re in trouble. We’ve had eight games so far this season, and we’ve let the opposition score a combined total of three points against us. We lost our first game to Colby College 3-0 and we’ve since pitched seven consecutive shutout victories. We don’t just want to win; we want to dominate. We don’t just want to tackle them when they have the ball; we want them to remember being tackled. We play like a pack of wild dogs.
It’s snowing. Slush covers the field. Big flakes continue to fall. Kents Hill School took a two-hour bus ride to get here—here being, New Hampton Prep, where I’m continuing my education. I graduated from high school last year, and I’ve added a post-graduate year. . I want to play football in college, and an extra season will allow me to get bigger, faster and stronger.
Our whole team is a little off. Every guy has a backstory. He wants to get bigger, or he wants to improve his grades or there’s some other reason why he landed in a remote town in the mountains of New Hampshire for a fifth year of high school. We’re a team of 22 kids from all over New England. Most of us had success on the field in high school. And we’re all a little bit mental.
The other team should have stayed home. By the third quarter the snow has stopped, but we haven’t. We’ve got another shutout on the board in the third quarter. Kents Hill has the ball, and they accomplish something opposing teams rarely do—they get the ball past our side of the 50-yard line. They desperately want to score. It’d be a victory to do what no other team has done all season against us—score a touchdown. But not today. Not on our watch.
