The Last Season

by Stuart Stevens

  My father looked at me for a moment, then patted my knee. “Nice try.”

  While around us the State faithful cheered, Prescott ran or passed with enough dazzling moves to evoke unpleasant flashbacks of Johnny Manziel. With two seconds left in the game, he put Mississippi State on the Ole Miss twenty-one-yard line. The field goal team came out while our new Mississippi State friends grew pensively silent.

  “Our kicker is terrible,” Nell said. “Lord. Please.”

  I immediately felt better. “There’s hope,” I whispered to my father but still couldn’t bring myself to watch the kick. When I heard Nell and her friends cry out in pain, my fan heart leaped with joy. Dad and I beamed at each other, then immediately felt guilty, as if we had insulted our hosts’ cooking. “I saw you,” Nell said, sighing. “It’s okay. This is just when I have to remind myself it’s only a game.”

  “Does that ever work?” Dad asked.

  “Never,” she said, sighing loudly. “Not once.”

  We were in overtime play, a concept I find insulting. For decades, college football games ended in ties, and no one thought it was a shameful state of affairs. Frustrating and disappointing, but it was a legitimate end to any contest: if after four quarters the score was a tie, the game ended in a tie. But then came this abominable “innovation” that forced teams to play a bastardized version of the game that was all too close to one of those shameful soccer shoot-outs.

  My overtime hatred ramped up when Mississippi State won the toss and Dak Prescott quickly scored. The cowbells erupted. It was awful. My dad looked pained but stoic. He leaned forward, as if he could will the Rebels to score.

  When Ole Miss started, they completed two quick passes to move to the eleven-yard line. “That’s perfect,” Dad said. “They can get a first down on the one-yard line.”

  Then, in one of those slow-motion nightmares, the quarterback Bo Wallace faked a handoff, then ran through a huge opening on the right side of the line. A couple of steps from the goal line, a Mississippi State defender desperately lunged for Wallace, missing the tackle but knocking the ball from his arms. “No!” my father yelled, jumping to his feet as I followed him.

  As the ball skidded into the end zone, Wallace reached out for it without a chance in the world to bring it back as Mississippi State recovered, winning the game. Bo Wallace lay where he had fallen, and all I could think about was how horrible he must feel. It was the last game of the year, and this is how it ended. “That was…” I struggled to find the right word.

  “Cruel,” Dad said. I nodded.

  Nell came over and hugged us both. “I’m so sorry,” she said, then laughed. “Okay, not really sorry, but I feel terrible for you!”

  “Well,” Dad said, sighing, “we’ve lost before.”

  On the way back to the hotel, we found ourselves behind the Ole Miss team bus. “Long ride back to Oxford,” Dad said quietly.

  Over the weekend, when we did the usual Thanksgiving thing in North Carolina, Dad and I replayed the Egg Bowl game in all the different ways Ole Miss could have won. But in the end, after we had Wallace passing instead of fumbling into the end zone, after we had made the field goals that were missed, it came back to the same: we lost.

  What Dad had said that night was true: we had lost before and would again. Somehow it seemed right that it was a loss of a different sort, a political campaign, that had led me into one more season. Both had ended on cold November nights with much regret. But I was learning that at the end of the day there was the end of the day and loss awaits us all. There might have been a time when I thought great success could freeze time or buy a little piece of something close to immortality, but that was, I realized, vain foolishness. Like this season my father and I just had, there would always be losses, and they would always hurt, but there was still the time together and shared joys.

  “I think they’ll be better next year,” Dad said. We were sitting on the couch at my sister’s house, watching some Thanksgiving weekend games that didn’t interest us much.

  For an hour or so, we went through all the reasons that Ole Miss would improve: third year of Coach Hugh Freeze, Bo Wallace would have more experience, the incredible freshmen would be sophomores.

  “Do you believe it?” I asked my father.

  “Of course!” he responded instantly. Then smiled. “You have to believe it’s going to be better, don’t you?”

  I agreed.

  “Let’s go outside,” he said.

  We both bundled up, and on the way out the door he picked up an old football that was sitting in a corner. One of my sister’s dogs liked to push it around with his nose.

  Outside my dad bounced it up and down in his hands, then nodded to me. “Go long,” he said.

  I trotted across her lawn. He got between the imaginary center’s legs, took the snap, and dropped back a few feet to pass. He threw the wobbly spiral over my head. I shouted and chased the ball.

  “Run,” Dad yelled. “You got it.”

  I caught it, then turned to toss it to him.

  “Next year will be better,” I said.

  He caught the ball with surprising grace. Somewhere in there was still a true athlete.

  “No doubt about it,” he said and lofted the ball toward me.

  I ran to catch it.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Stuart Stevens grew up in Jackson, Mississippi. He has worked in many political campaigns in the United States and abroad. The author of five previous books, he has also written extensively for television, including Northern Exposure. His writing has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Esquire, Outside, and The Atlantic, among others. He is a columnist for The Daily Beast. For more information, visit www.stuartstevens.com.