The olde days

Tonight was the beginning of high school football. I can see the lights glowing from every little town and village in America. I was thinking about the first Friday when I was an eighth grader at Peachtree High School. I don't remember who I went to the game with that night. I know the stands were full that night. It seemed like the whole school was there. The varsity football team wore red jerseys and white pants with red and blue stripes down the side. The white helmets with the patriots on the side. The band at halftime stretched across the entire field, in five yard increments, from goal line to goal line and from sideline to sideline. They had a big sound.

And the football team won and everyone seemed to be excited when it happened. Ironically, we played Peachtree in our first game when I was a senior at Dunwoody. And we wore the red jerseys, only this time we wore gold pants and red helmets with a gold wildcat on the side. And I remember looking up into the stands and it seemed like the entire football stadium was full of students and parents and brothers and sisters.

We won, 10-0. It was not an easy season, per se. We struggled with some games we shouldn't have, played at a higher level but lost to some good teams, and beat a couple of teams we weren't supposed to. Going into the last game, we were 5-4 and the sportswriter for the Decatur paper said there wasn't a chance we were going to have a winning record in our first season. He predicted we would lose to Chamblee by a sizeable margin.

At the beginning of the game, all the seniors were honorary co-captains. But Jeff Meadows and I were up front, meeting three out of four co-captains for Chamblee who also played with me in Pop Warner football for the Atlanta Colts. We smirked at each other as the official tossed the coin. We would meet again after the game on the sideline. I had just tackled Eddie Jackson in a big water puddle on the sidelines for the last play of the game. All of us were enjoying one more opportunity to be together and relive our past glories. My father was crying in the stands, unseen by me at the time.

At the end of the game, we had upset Chamblee 28-6. My favorite moment? A quarterback sack against Tommy Schreiber for a 32 yard loss. It was 3rd and 42 after that play. I chased him all over the field until he finally fell at my feet. I felt like a big cat on that play.

Later, I found out that my buddy, John Boswell, had been sitting on a sofa in his future wife's house, when the announcer on the television set showed a defensive play for Dunwoody and called my name. It was the beginning of a path of marriage and adult life for John and four more years of football and education for me.

Its funny how our lives tangle, disentangle and join again over the years. Sometimes it is a conscious effort on our parts. Sometimes it is just happenstance.