by Amy Bass
Morrissey had learned a lot from his Lewiston friends. He knew they hated dogs and hibachi. He also knew they played soccer unlike anyone else, and he was envious of their unity. When it came time for Scarborough’s traditional playoff hair session, Morrissey opted for blue. It was his prediction, much like McGraw’s, that he would face his friends in the final.
“They play a good soccer,” Abdi H. told McGraw about Scarborough’s stars. “Very physical, good style, a hardworking team.”
And, of course, they’re big. Scarborough’s size advantage—even Lewiston’s taller players, like Karim and Maslah, were significantly skinnier—and physical style meant that Lewiston’s speed would be more important than ever.
“Move the ball fast and avoid hits,” Abdi H. told his teammates. But he knew there would be hits. Caron, in particular, he knew to be a very physical player.
McGraw listened to Abdi H and Maslah. He listened to all of them, encouraging his captains to take the lead, ceding some of his authority. It was one of the biggest modifications he’d made as a coach as his roster had changed over the years, asking what they knew about the next team on the schedule, finding out who they’d played with and what they knew about them.
“One of the things I’ve learned is do less talking,” he admits. “Which is hard for me.”
When McGraw overhears his players on the sideline talking about what’s going on in the game, he doesn’t tell them to hush. He calls them over and asks questions.
“Yeah?” he encourages. “That’s what we should do? Then do it—tell them out there!”
Based on stats, local pundits gave Lewiston the advantage in the showdown between the two top-ranked and unbeaten teams. While Scarborough’s Caron and King were regional all-star selections, four Blue Devils made the cut: Karim and Zak, and Maslah and Abdi H., whose deadly precision-passing game had the Red Storm on high alert. While both teams had straight shutouts in the playoffs, Lewiston outscored opponents 13–0, while Scarborough topped their side of the bracket 7–0.
But McGraw knew there was one set of numbers his guys didn’t have. This game marked only the third time in history that Lewiston soccer had played for a state championship. Scarborough not only had more experience playing in a state final. It had more experience winning it. A year before, Lewiston bowed to an opponent no one had given much thought. Now they were walking into the eye of a top-seeded Red Storm.
Chapter 16
Everyone Bleeds Blue
None of them could sleep. All throughout Lewiston, Blue Devils tossed and turned.
Up at five, the pressure of his first state final plagued Maslah. Usually so self-assured, today he was nervous. He kept thinking about sitting in the bleachers after the Cheverus game, absolutely devastated, tears rolling down his face. Cheverus was the seventh seed coming into that game, he kept thinking. And Lewiston lost. Now they were facing the best. Already showered, Maslah decided that worrying wasn’t getting him anywhere. He ate something, brushed his teeth, and headed back to bed, hoping sleep would come.
Q felt the same way. He’d finally shut his eyes well after midnight, around two or so. When he woke up, he looked at the clock: six a.m. That surprised him. He usually wasn’t an early riser, especially on a Saturday. But this was no ordinary Saturday. Like Maslah, he’d never played in a state final. Last year in Syracuse, he’d waited to hear from his friends about the championship game. When the texts finally came, the news wasn’t good. Now he was back with his teammates. It was exciting, something he’d imagined since the moment his mother told him they were moving back to Lewiston.
Giving up on getting any more rest, Q got out of bed and pulled himself together. The oldest of eight, he wanted to get out of the apartment before anyone else woke up. Food, he thought. Doughnuts. He didn’t eat doughnuts very often. They weren’t cheap. But he wanted something different, something with frosting. Somali doughnuts, kac kac, didn’t have frosting. They were more like a biscuit, eaten with tea. An American doughnut was a treat, Q thought, a breakfast of champions, maybe, to celebrate the day.
Leaving the apartment quietly, he walked over to the Italian Bakery. The white cement-block building sits on Bartlett Street next to Mark W. Paradis Park, where Maulid used to kick a ball around with his dad and Abdikadir Negeye held soccer practice in the early days of the SBYA league. The bakery is the one bit of color on the drab, run-down street, its red-and-green stripes and bright awning resembling the Italian flag. “E’molto buono!” the sign says—it’s very good. The bakery opens at six every morning but Monday, its hand-cut doughnuts often selling out on the weekend.
It’s early, Q noted again, as light crept across the city on his short walk to the bakery. Really early.
On the other side of the city, Austin, too, was awake and wanted a doughnut. He didn’t go to the Italian Bakery; that was a more downtown thing. Instead, he drove over to Dunkin’ Donuts, which he often did before school. The game was at noon, but Coach wanted them at the high school by ten. Everything felt off; they never played this early.
Dek didn’t want doughnuts. He wanted sleep. He had been up most of the night thinking about the preseason loss to Scarborough. Now he was panicking that he wouldn’t play well with so little sleep. He thought about last year’s state final, which he, like Maslah, watched from the stands. It was terrifying to think about. Cheverus was supposed to be easy, he thought, and Lewiston lost. What if it goes hard on us again? We need to get a wrench on these guys, he decided. We can’t do anything stupid. He looked at the clock. Still two hours until he had to leave. It was going to be a frustrating morning.
Like the others, Maulid had been awake for hours; up so early he took a thirty-minute nap at eight, unable to keep his eyes open. He woke up again when Q called. He wanted to come over to show Maulid his new haircut, which he was hiding from his mother. He got it cut after the ritual spaghetti dinner at Trinity the night before, a Mohawk like Nuri’s. They wanted to do something cool—“beast mode,” Q said—like the team had done last year when they sprayed their heads blue and white. “You look good, you play good,” Gish always told them.
Let Scarborough waste time on hair, Maulid thought, his own shaped into a “box” style. But still, Q got a Mohawk? “Come over,” Maulid told him. “My mom wants to see your hair. Then we’ll get ready.”
While the players were waking up, Gish’s daughter Lilly was busy at the school decorating the team bus. “I’ve got to do something,” she told him after they won the regional title. But Gish didn’t really pay attention to her plans until his wife, Cindy, asked him about it.
“You guys decorating the bus?” she said.
“No,” Gish answered. “Just want to keep things normal.”
“Um, yeah,” she responded. “That’s not an option.”
Cindy Gish knew Lewiston. Her father had worked as city clerk for decades, and she and her four sisters all graduated from the high school. Now principal of Geiger Elementary, she’d worked her way through the ranks of the school system, teaching first grade at McMahon before serving as assistant principal there and at Montello. But back in the day, she was a state championship–winning cheerleader. She knew that Lilly’s idea was a good one.
“You really need to decorate that bus,” she repeated.
Gish stood firm. “We’re going to keep it as normal as possible.”
“Come on, we’re going to decorate the bus,” she replied. “They need that bus decorated.”
Cindy and Lilly weren’t talking about a few posters. They got blue-and-white streamers and made signs for each player to put in the windows. For the back of the bus, Lilly made a bigger sign: “WE LOVE McGRAW.”
“That’s awesome,” Gish said when he saw it. “Just wicked.”
When the players started arriving at the high school just before ten, Gish thought back to the classic husband-and-wife conversation. My wife, he thought, looking at the players’ faces when they saw the bus, is obviously the more intelligent person
in the family.
Q didn’t see the bus when he arrived at the back of the school near the gym entrance. No one was there. He panicked. Did he miss it?
“Hey,” Abdijabar Hersi called, walking over to him from his car. “You’re in the wrong place.”
Hersi and Q walked around to the front of the school. Beautiful, Q thought when he saw the bus. He’d never seen anything like it. The first time he was going to states, and he’d be riding a bus decorated like that? Unbelievable. No one had ever done anything like this for him. No one had ever done anything like this for any of them.
“Who did this so early in the morning?” Maulid asked when he walked up.
He shook McGraw’s hand before stepping on the bus, taking in the posters, the drawings of trophies, and the streamers cascading from the ceiling all the way down the aisle. “WE R DEVILS” read a big sign in the middle. “L-H-S” read another. Maulid started to feel some of his nerves dissipate. It felt good, looking at this bus.
But Dek couldn’t shake his nerves. He loved the decorations, the support they represented, but all of it made him more anxious. I don’t want to disappoint these people, he thought, looking at the decorations. And his dad was going to the game. He didn’t want to disappoint his dad.
They took their seats next to their bedazzled names, Q and Nuri’s haircuts giving everyone something to talk about. Joe, too, had shaved the sides of his head. Q settled into his seat, finally smiling. Maslah, he noticed, wasn’t talking to anyone, earbuds already in place. Good idea, Q thought, putting on his headphones.
Abdi H. was out of sorts as he approached the bus. Everything about this “noon environment,” as he called it, felt weird. The routine was off. He felt better when he saw Doe Mahamud, the team statistician, waiting next to the bus, orange smoothie in hand. Always the nattiest guy on the field, Doe went all-out for the championship game with a suit and tie, a fedora topping his head. Abdi H. grabbed him and handed his phone to Gish for a photo. That’s more like it, he thought as he boarded the bus, shaking his head. Leave it to Doe.
McGraw gave the team a few encouraging words as the bus pulled out of the parking lot and headed toward the turnpike. Abdi H. wondered if anyone was even listening. Because of the decorations, they couldn’t see out the windows, which gave the bus an almost cave-like atmosphere.
“Listen up, listen up,” McGraw rasped.
He didn’t have much to say. The offense was unstoppable, the backline a wall. Usually he talked to them about the “what-ifs” of a game, about who might lure them into an offside trap, or put a shell on them. Both Mt. Blue and Mt. Ararat had done that, forcing them to make adjustments in the second half. McGraw had a hunch Scarborough would try the same to shut down Abdi H. and Maslah.
But he didn’t need to tell them that. They were a mature group of guys. Mental preparation was their biggest challenge, and he’d been talking about that since the beginning of the season. This is going to be my way and their way, he thought. I’m not going to tell them how to do this. So he simply told them to play their game, no matter what Scarborough threw at them.
“It is going to be a game for the ages,” he said. “The people down in Portland? They do not know what a great game it’s going to be. It’s going to be one of the games that’s going to go down in history as something they’re going to remember for a very, very long time.”
McGraw took a moment to feel the enormity of what he was about to say. It was about more than soccer; it had been for quite a while. His players just wanted to play, just wanted to win. McGraw wanted that, too; wanted it for so long, it was hard to remember a time when he didn’t want it. But he also knew where he was from, and what it meant to be coach of this team in this town with this one goal. He looked at them hard, his blue eyes serious. Say it simple, he thought.
“We are gonna do it together.”
His shorter-than-usual speech done, McGraw got quiet. That’s rare, thought Austin, but like everyone else, he hunkered down with his phone and his music, thinking about what was to come. We’ve got this, Austin thought.
As the bus neared the tall pines encircling Fitzpatrick Stadium, Nuri was done with the quiet. It was time to get loud, he decided. The chants began.
“YAKULAK!” the team yelled back at Nuri. Maulid loved that part. We will eat them, he thought. We will get them.
As the bus sat in the parking lot behind the stadium, the Blue Devils’ tidal wave grew louder. “We could hear you from the field,” some of the girls playing in the Gorham versus Bangor match told Austin about the chanting. “You were louder than our fans.”
By Maine standards, Fitzpatrick Stadium is huge. Seating 6,000 people, it offers a full-scale turf playing field and a bright red rubberized track. It sits next to Hadlock Field, home of the Portland Sea Dogs, the Double-A affiliate of the Boston Red Sox. When the Blue Devils got off the bus, they walked behind Hadlock to the far side of the bleachers so they could have a few minutes to gather themselves.
McGraw was prepared. He’d made sure the assistant coaches had the answer to any logistical question that might come up. He wanted the players to stay focused. They were already dressed, their blue uniforms beneath their blue-and-white jackets and black pants, but still had to deal with socks and shin guards and cleats, find their hated mouth guards, and get taped.
As they approached their bench, Abdi H. ran over to the fence to greet a familiar figure. Ali Hersi, Abdijabar’s younger brother, was waiting for them, the first of McGraw’s alums to show up but by no means the last. Behind him, Lewiston fans started to fill the stands. AD Jason Fuller had arranged for two rooter buses to bring students. He was shocked when both sold out.
Fuller was having a crazy week. A few days before, senior Osman Doorow, born in Kenya to Somali parents and coached by Kim Wettlaufer, won the cross-country running state title. Now Fuller had another state championship on his hands. But he smiled as the buses pulled out. That’s our community, right there, he thought, looking at the kids through the windows, faces painted blue and white regardless of what—baseball cap, ski hat, or hijab—they had on their head.
Fuller hurried home to grab his wife and three kids to head to Portland. His kids went to Oak Hill, but were dressed head to foot in blue and white. My kids bleed blue, he thought, looking at them. When they arrived in Portland, Fuller was stunned by the traffic, especially because it was still an hour before game time. He knew where to park, but had no idea there would be this many people. As he walked toward the stadium, he started to get goose bumps. This is a football crowd, he thought. Scarborough versus Lewiston. A perfect storm.
When Shobow Saban had heard that both rooter buses sold out, he got busy. Some of the kids he worked with at MEIRS wanted to go to the game. They knew he loved soccer, that he probably was going, but they had no money. He called his cousin, some friends, anyone who had a car.
“I had to make sure that whoever asked me could get there and witness,” he said of his preparations. “That they could say, ‘I was there.’”
Shobow gassed up five cars that morning. But he, too, was stunned at the number of people filling the stands. It reminded him of when he went to a New England Revolution game at Gillette Stadium with McGraw. The noise, the crowds, the chanting fans. But these were Lewiston fans, Shobow thought. He flashed back to when his family had first arrived in Lewiston, the days when people told him to leave.
His mother told him then to have a big heart, to have empathy. “When you love others,” she said, “sincerely love them, you will eventually get it back.” Looking at the crowd of Blue Devils fans—white, black, Muslim, Catholic, Somali, Franco—Shobow realized that his mother was right. While his community wasn’t perfect, it was better. He felt the stereotypes—terrorist, drug dealer, pirate—that had plagued him just a few years ago beginning to disappear. Here, he thought looking at the field, he was a proud Lewiston soccer player.
From the field, Austin kept glancing at the stands as he drilled with Alex, rotating
post to post while Henrikson tossed balls at them from the eighteen. Section after section was a sea of blue and white, with a smaller wall of red representing Scarborough to the right. Austin couldn’t find his family. It wasn’t like a home game where his mother was in the Snack Shack and his father was grilling.
“This feels like premier league,” Maulid said to Mwesa and Joe as they started jogging around the field. As they ran by their own fan section, the crowd went nuts, clanging cowbells and beating drums while yelling “WOOOOOOOooooOOOOOO DEVILS!” They waved to people they knew, turning every time someone called their names. Maulid saw his sisters and brothers, his mom and dad, his four cousins from Vermont, and his baby niece.
“I wonder if they made her buy a ticket,” he joked. She wasn’t even a year old.
Maulid’s family, like so many others, had made signs for the game. Abdiweli held one high over his head—an enormous #11 accompanied by a collage of newspaper clippings and photographs of Maulid, including the now-iconic photo of him leaping onto Maslah’s back in the EL game. Nearby in the student section, a friend held up a sign that read “WARNING: HE COULD FLIP AT ANY TIME—#11 MAULID!” Maulid appreciated the support, but the noise was getting to him. The crowd was so close. He pulled up his hood, trying to shut it out. “It’s windy,” he said when teammates asked him what he was doing.
Fuller stood in front of the bleachers on the red track, his head moving in time to the beating drums. Stay in your seats, he silently pleaded with the fans, thinking years back to the Mt. Ararat game and the excessive celebration call. He climbed into the bleachers to sit for a bit. He wanted to remind them about what was at stake, about making good choices. And to stay in their seats.
