by Mike Lupica
Wanting way too much for this quarterback to throw the winning pass.
The ball went through Ben’s hands, fell to the ground incomplete as the Rams fell to 0–2.
Ben didn’t even remember dropping to his knees.
But there he was in the grass now, the ball in front of him, still not believing what had just happened, not believing the game had ended the way it had, that he’d lost it all by himself.
He always wanted the ball in his hands at the end of a close game, in any sport.
It just wasn’t supposed to go through his hands.
Not like this, not now.
He was aware of a lot of yelling from behind him, knowing it was from the Hewitt Giants, who weren’t the worst team in the league anymore.
Because we are, Ben thought.
He stayed where he was, his knees on the five-yard line, hands on his thigh pads, still staring at the ball on the field in front of him.
“Hey.”
Ben looked up and saw Sam Brown. Next to Sam was Coop. His wingmen. That’s what Coop said they were, even before they started calling themselves the Core Four.
Sam put out his hand. Ben reached for it. Sam pulled him to his feet, saying, “Come on, we’re pretty much done here.”
Sam was grinning at him, helmet already off, holding it in his left hand.
“I can’t believe I dropped it,” Ben said.
“It happens,” Coop said, “even to you, a guy who’s a total dog most of the time.”
“Dog” to Coop was high praise. You just had to know that his vocabulary was sometimes upside down from everybody else’s. “Stupid” was good, too.
“Today I was a mutt,” Ben said.
“Coop’s right,” Sam said, “even though I don’t believe I just said that. Happens to everybody and now it happened to you. What about the time your guy, Aaron Rodgers, coughed it up in overtime in the playoffs? The guy from the Cardinals ran it in and the Pack’s season was over.”
“Rodgers got hit,” Ben said.
“His season was still over,” Sam said. “Ours isn’t.”
“You sure?” Ben said.
“Who’s the guy always saying we win as a team and lose as a team?” Coop said. “Wait, I know. It’s you.”
“Not today,” Ben said. “Today it was all me.”
“Right, you’re the worst player ever,” Sam said. “Now let’s go shake hands and see how fast we can get out of Hewitt.”
Ben looked around for Shawn, wanting to apologize for dropping a sure game-winner. In a big spot, Shawn had stepped up and made the play. Been the player he wanted to be.
Ben wanted to make sure he knew it wasn’t his fault that the Rams had lost.
Everybody else was already in the line. That included Shawn this time, up at the front, right ahead of his dad. Ben and Sam and Coop fell in, went through the motions even though they didn’t feel like it, kept mumbling “Great game” and “Way to go” to the Hewitt guys, just wanting this part of the day to be over the way the game was.
Then go listen to Coach try to put a smiley face on this week’s killer loss.
Shawn was about halfway to their bench when Ben caught up with him. “Dude,” he said. “I am so stinking sorry.”
Shawn stopped, took off his helmet now, staring at Ben at first as if he was just some random guy from the other team.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Thanks?”
“Yeah,” Shawn said. “You promised to be my friend, and just now you were.”
Ben said, “I don’t get it.”
“No, I feel a lot better now,” Shawn said.
Ben starting to hear the sarcasm in his voice.
“Yeah,” Shawn O’Brien said, “I feel a whole lot better today knowing I’m not the biggest choker on the team.”
Ben opened his mouth, closed it, not sure what to say to that. Now the Bad Shawn wasn’t just in at quarterback, talking to himself after a bad play, he was standing right in front of Ben.
Ben didn’t know Sam and Coop were still with him, but heard Sam’s voice now.
“Shut up,” he said.
Ben said to Sam, “Let it go.”
“No,” Sam said.
He stepped up so that he was on Ben’s right shoulder. Coop was on the other side.
Sam said to Shawn, “You must be joking, calling somebody else a choker.”
“What, he didn’t choke?” Shawn said. “What game were you watching? A five-year-old could have caught that ball.”
“I’m starting to think maybe a five-year-old threw it,” Coop said.
“You’re a real team guy, O’Brien, you know that?” Sam said.
Shawn looked at all of them.
“Yeah,” Shawn said. “You should probably talk to the coach and get him to throw me off it.”
Then he turned and walked away. Sam started to go after him, Ben put a hand on his arm and stopped him, not wanting this to be any worse than it already was.
If that was possible.
“Let him go,” Ben said.
“I told you he was a jerk,” Coop said.
Ben wasn’t sure what Shawn was right now. Or who he was. Or why the guy he’d been working out with all week had said what he said, acted the way he had. All Ben knew was that he’d come into the season wanting to get to know Shawn better and unfortunately, now he did.
It was only four o’clock when the bus Coach O’Brien had rented for the team out of his own pocket turned into the parking lot at Rockwell Middle School. Even though most of the parents had traveled to Hewitt to watch the game, Coach still wanted the players to return home from road trips — even short ones — together.
“There are all kinds of ways to learn how to be a real team,” he said, “and one of them is on the ride home. Win or lose.”
Shawn sat with his dad in the first seat behind the driver. Ben and Sam and Coop were all the way in back.
Sam hardly ever lost his temper, it was why Ben was surprised to see him come at Shawn the way he did after the game. Usually it was Coop who acted like a hothead, and that was the Coop they had gotten for the whole ride back, Coop keeping his voice low, but still going on and on about Shawn, and finding different ways to call him a scrub.
If “dog” was the biggest compliment you could get out of Coop, “scrub” was the biggest insult. He was still at it even as the bus pulled to a stop.
“Total scrub,” Coop said as the guys started to file off the bus, “from the scrub Hall of Fame. If you want to grow up to be a scrub someday, you put his picture up on your wall.”
Ben said, “I think he just needed somebody to be mad at.”
Now Sam got hot all over again.
“For the last time,” Sam said, “stop defending this guy. He sold you out for one dropped ball.”
Ben could see how steamed he still was, so he let it go, but not before Sam said, “You know how Coach says you gotta learn to lose before you learn to win sometimes? It’s gonna be no problem for his son. Because he’s a complete loser already.”
Before they got into their parents’ cars, Sam and Coop asked Ben if he wanted them to come over once they got out of their gear. Ben said he’d give them a shout-out before dinner, or maybe right after, but right now he wanted to go chill by himself.
Not an option, as it turned out.
When he got home, there was Lily sitting on his front porch waiting for him.
From the backseat Ben said to his parents, “Okay, which one of you called her and told her how the game ended?”
Both his mom and dad swore they didn’t.
“Then she definitely does have a sixth sense,” Ben said. “Or a sick sense. Girl’s a freak.”
“Just speaking from the female perspective,” Beth McBain said, “I’m hoping you can find a better way to describe Lily’s psychic powers if you mention them to her.”
Ben had taken off his shoulder pads and jersey and cleats in the car, was just wearing a T-shirt now, along with his
football pants and socks. Lily was in sneakers and so when she came down the steps to greet him, she seemed even taller compared to Ben than she usually was.
Figures, he thought.
In the biggest moment of the season so far, he had come up small. So small.
“Okay,” Ben said, “who ratted me out?”
Lily smiled, making him feel better right away even though he didn’t want to, he wanted to stay bummed.
“Ratted you out on what?”
“That I blew the game for us.”
“Oh,” Lily said, “that.”
“Yeah. That.”
Lily said, “I thought you meant somebody had told me something major, not the ending to some silly old football game.”
“Not silly to me.”
“Yeah,” Lily said, “it’s a shame that your season had to end that way.” Still smiling. “Oh, wait,” she said, slapping her forehead now, “the season didn’t come to an end. Or the world!”
“You didn’t tell me who told you.”
“Well, if you must know, Justin’s parents couldn’t go to the game, but he needed to tell them when pickup was. So he borrowed a phone and called home and Ella” — Justin’s sister — “answered. And Justin told her and she called and told me and here I am.”
“Here you are,” Ben said. “But I don’t want to talk about the game.”
“Me neither!”
Ben couldn’t help himself. She sounded so relieved it made him laugh.
“C’mon,” Lily said, pulling him by the arm, “let’s go sit on the swings. I know that always makes me feel better about everything.”
“Just let me get out of these stupid football clothes,” he said. “Take me one minute.”
“Stupid clothes for a stupid game, if you ask me.”
Ben managed a smile now. “Just keep talking, Lils, you won’t even notice I’m gone.”
He ran up to his bedroom, put on his favorite Packers Super Bowl T-shirt, shorts, sneakers, thinking to himself:
Maybe I didn’t want to be alone nearly as much as I thought I did.
Or maybe he just wanted to be alone except for Lily.
They walked to the far end of McBain Field, stopped before they got to the basketball court, each of them taking a swing. Their moms had pushed them in these swings when they were little.
They each gave themselves a push with their legs, quietly rocked back and forth in the air.
When they took a break Lily said, “What?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Didn’t have to. Never have to. So go ahead and talk about whatever it is you’re not talking about, even if it is the silly game you said you weren’t going to talk about.”
He took a deep breath, let it out.
“Okay,” Ben said. “If we had won today, we’d have one win and one loss, and we’d be fine. But now we’re not fine because we’re 0–2 and might have no chance of playing in the championship game.”
“And it’s all your fault.”
“Well, yeah, now that you mention it.”
“You really are such an idiot sometimes.”
“No argument. Clumsy one, too.”
“I don’t know anything about your idiotic game and I know that your team probably wouldn’t have had any chance to win without you.”
“Doesn’t matter why you lost. Just that you lost. A famous coach said that one time.”
“Blah blah blah,” Lily said with a wave of her hand. “Now what else aren’t you telling me?”
Why fight it? Girl was a total mind-reading freak.
At least with me she is, Ben thought.
“Actually, there is one other thing,” he said, and told her what Shawn said to him when the game was over.
“He really said that?” she said. “To you?”
Ben nodded.
“The guy you tried to help not be so much of a choker himself?”
“Sam and Coop didn’t want to hear it, but I said he just needed to be hacked off at somebody and picked me. Guys do that sometimes.”
“You don’t.”
“Sure I do,” Ben said, grinning at her. “I just don’t try it in front of you.”
“No, McBain,” she said. “You don’t. You’re a boy, everybody knows boys are a little slow sometimes. But you’re not mean. You’re never mean. And what he said to you was plain old mean.”
Then Lily Wyatt said, “Something I am going to point out to that boy on Monday.”
“No,” Ben said. “Sam and Shawn nearly went at it after the game. But this is between him and me.”
“Why were you so nice to him in the first place?” she said, cocking that eyebrow like she could.
“I already told you.”
“Right. I know what you told me.”
“I was just trying to help a guy out, help him get better.”
“How’s that workin’ out for you so far?”
“Hey,” Ben said, “nobody wants to get called a gagger. But it’s not like he was lying, at least today. You can see he’s all worried about letting his dad down and today he snapped after I let him down.”
“You just dropped a ball,” Lily said.
“Can we drop this?” Ben said.
“Done,” she said.
Then she gave him her best smile so far and said, “See how easy it is to drop stuff?”
Ben still thought Shawn might try to call and apologize on Sunday for what he said. But he didn’t. Didn’t apologize at school on Monday.
So just like that, things had changed between them.
Because of one dropped pass.
They didn’t talk about it on the phone, didn’t talk about it at school, didn’t talk about it at practice. It wasn’t as if they were not talking. They didn’t ignore each other in the hall or on the field. But now it was as if the good stuff that started to happen between them — that day over pizza, then at Shawn’s field when he shared his secret about not wanting to be a quarterback, at McBain Field — had never happened.
Like they’d de-friended each other.
Anybody watching them at practice before their next game, against Parkerville, wouldn’t have thought anything had changed between them. Ben knew better. So did Sam and Coop. And Lily, because Ben would tell her all about it when he got home.
“You gotta stop worrying about this guy,” Sam said to Ben at The Rock on Saturday morning, the two of them first to show up for the Parkerville game. “You keep making excuses for him, but I keep telling you: If he could chump on you like that, he was never going to be your friend.”
“Maybe he doesn’t know how to be a friend any more than he knows how to be a quarterback,” Ben said. “Maybe he just has to learn how.”
Sam said, “Give it up.” Held up a hand and said, “I know, I know, he’s our teammate.”
“He is.”
“And he had a chance to act like one, and didn’t,” Sam said. “Maybe that was the real choke job last Saturday, a bigger one, because being a friend is more important than winning a game.”
Ben said, “How about we just talk about the game we’re going to play and not the one we played last week.”
“Now you’re making sense,” Sam said. “I am so down with that.”
Ben knew something: Once Sam dug in, try moving him. Especially when he thought someone had been disloyal. Sam cared a lot about sports, as much as Ben did. But he didn’t say things just to sound good. He really did care about friendship and loyalty more.
That was his real Bro Code, even if he didn’t talk about his as much as Coop did.
Ben did bring it all back to football now, and not just because he wanted to change the subject from Shawn O’Brien.
He said, “My dad says you’re never as bad as you look when you’re losing and never as good as you look when you’re winning. So how about we find out today if that’s true about the winning part?”
Sam reached out and tapped him some fist, and then ran down the field and Ben threw him
the ball he’d been holding in his right hand. And just like that, it wasn’t last Saturday anymore. It was this Saturday. This game against Parkerville. The only one that mattered.
But he knew that the Rams getting their first win of the season wasn’t going to be easy. The Parkerville Patriots would probably have won the Bantam championship the year before if their quarterback, Robbie Burnett, hadn’t broken his wrist with three games to go. Robbie had been the best quarterback in the league last season, as big as Shawn, with an even better arm. And Robbie was much better running the ball. The whole package. He really was a born quarterback. Last year’s Patriots had only lost once before Robbie got hurt, then never won another game after he did.
He was back now, though. According to Coop, who had a cousin on the Parkerville team, Robbie was throwing and running better than ever and the Patriots had started their season with two straight wins.
“You can even tell how good he is watching him warm up,” Coop said.
“We’re still winning today,” Ben said.
“Yeah,” Coop said, “if our quarterback shows up.”
“Maybe today’s the day Shawn surprises us,” Ben said.
“You mean he’s going to be a good player and a good guy?” Coop said.
“Football’s not a game of one-on-one,” Ben said, “our quarterback against theirs.”
Coop walked away, saying, “Good thing.”
When Coach O’Brien spoke to them behind the bench right before the game, he kept things brief. And got Ben to thinking all over again about how even as he liked Shawn less and less, he liked his dad more and more.
“We’re getting better,” Coach said. “I know you still can’t see that in that left-hand column where the wins go. But I can see it. I see it in the way you guys fight, how hard you work at practice. And I can see the thing coaches always look for when a team is scuffling: I see the way you’re hanging together.”
Coop and Ben were in the back of the circle and now Coop whispered, “Well, some of us are.”
Ben put an elbow into his ribs to shut him up.
Coach said, “So we start our season all over again today. Everybody on this team just try to win a battle on each play with somebody on the other side of the line of scrimmage. Do that the whole game and no way those guys beat us.”
