It was another early November soccer game but this time there was nothing tangible on the line: no championship to be shooting for, no edgy adrenaline rush as we calculated points and tactics and overall strategy towards inevitable victory and another medal. After fourteen seasons of driving through the leagues from Classic V to Classic II, winning each league either flat out, or saving it till the last game . . . this one was anti-climactic. We were in the middle of the table with no chance to win the championship and add more hardware to the trophy cabinet and the glory of the team, but no threat of being relegated back down to Classic III either. The season was done after tonight, and so was I.
The sun was going down and the shadows were reaching across the pitch from the scrub behind me. There had been frost this morning and then enough sun by midday to scorch my nose, but these shadows had the feeling of winter in them, as if they had been hoarding their chill. We were on the only soccer pitch on this side of the street, surrounded by trees and evening shadows – across the street was a large modern complex of something like thirty fields and the last games of the evening were playing out over there, but the sounds were muted through some peculiarity of the landscape and I was put into mind of how I used to be able to hear the playground sounds at my elementary school when I’d stay home sick. We lived less than a mile from the school and the sounds of children would float disembodied through the trees, sounding near and far away at the same time. A melancholy sound . . .
The last time this team had played at the complex across the street we were fighting to remain at the top of the league and every game was do-or-die. In club soccer, only the league champion gets promoted to the next level, switching places with the last-place team in the bracket above. We were U16 then and at the top of the Classic IV table with ambitions to rise to the top league by the time our boys reached U19. In those days we mixed natural talent with organization and preparation and so we knew going into that game who the danger men were and what we had to do. We had studied their statistics and scouted their last game – in fact, we made sure they knew we were scouting them, arriving to watch that game wearing our uniforms so that they couldn’t miss us, hoping to squeeze that much more advantage out of the situation.
We ended up winning that game by a solitary goal scored in the final seconds of the game when our wing-back, playing heroically despite having the flu, drove into the box and slotted an unlikely shot from an unlikely angle – and then collapsed onto the pitch with nothing left to give. That’s who were in those days, dangerous until the final whistle blew, every boy playing like a man. Hero-stuff. We won the league that year and, when we were given our medals, I thought back to that game and how key that victory had been.
But this was a different year, a different league, and the boy who had scored that famous goal was gone now, graduated and playing in college. My co-coach was gone now too, he who had engineered the psy-war-ops scouting tactic; so many had come and gone and now this was my last game too, and the last time I would coach my oldest son and I stood there in the lengthening shadows feeling curiously displaced and inert as the boys stretched and taped their shinguards and tied their cleats with their special knots. I stood quietly and did not come out of myself to bark orders in preparation for this one game, this singular game, as I would have in the past. I found a folding camp chair and plopped down into it and waited for the referees to call for captains . . .
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