by Mike Lupica
Mike pulled Tommy to his feet, telling him to be cool.
“I am cool.” Then he smiled at Mike and said, “But, dude, those late hits do sting.”
Matt was yelling at Greck and the Bears as the ref closest to Matt walked him back toward the field.
Greck wasn’t quite done with him.
“How many times did you plan to hit the wrong guy on that play?” Greck said.
Tommy just watched it all from behind the bench, more stunned by what had just happened than angry, reminding himself that his interception probably had sealed the game for the Bears.
He didn’t know why he turned his head then. But he did. Maybe it was some kind of weird radar. It was why he had a great look at his sister, long legs flying like they used to in soccer, hurdling the wire fence like she was more of a track star, hitting the ground at full speed, heading straight for Matt Foley.
THIRTY-FOUR
TOMMY DROPPED THE BALL, stepped over the bench, and dashed toward Em, trying to cut her off before she got to Matt.
He didn’t know what the rules were about fans, but he wasn’t taking any chances with what might happen if Em got to Matt before he could stop her.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw his mom chasing her, too. But she had no shot. Em was as fast as she’d ever been.
What happened next would have been funny if Em hadn’t been so angry.
Coach Fisher reached out and scooped her up under his arm, as if it were the easiest thing in the world.
The Bears players knew how strong Coach was, how easily he could move a blocking sled when he wanted to show them the proper technique. They knew he was an ex-marine. Tommy’s dad had always said that John Fisher was one of those guys who was so tough he didn’t have to go around bragging about it.
So just like that, with hardly any motion or fuss, as if the whole thing was a designed play, he was holding Em—kicking and screaming and still yelling—in midair.
“Let me go!” she said, redirecting her anger at Coach. “Let . . . me . . . at . . . him!”
Tommy heard Coach say, “I can only let you go if you promise to be nice.”
“I promise to go smack that loser for what he just did to my brother!” she said, still trying to wriggle free from his grasp, but having no luck at all.
“Did you hear that, loser?” she yelled at Matt.
When Matt, still standing next to the ref, heard her, he pointed to himself and said, “You talking to me, little girl?”
“Just because you look like Bigfoot,” Em said, “doesn’t make me little.”
“Stop running your mouth, little girl,” Matt said.
Tommy took a step past Coach Fisher, who reached out and put a hand on his arm. “I got this,” Coach said.
His voice was so low that Tommy was surprised Matt could even hear him from about fifteen yards away. Or maybe he just saw the look in Coach’s eyes.
“No, son,” Coach Fisher said. “You stop running your mouth.”
That is exactly what Matt Foley did, as he turned and walked toward his team’s bench.
“Now, young lady,” Coach said, turning his attention back to the girl under his arm. “I am going to put you down. But you have to promise to be the nice young lady I know you are.”
“No, I’m not,” she said, her face still fierce.
“Yes,” he said, “you are.”
Tommy’s mom had made her way down to the field. She gave Em a stern look and said, “Emily, listen to Coach Fisher.”
Em looked at Coach, then Tommy, then her mom. Maybe she finally decided it was hard to look ferocious when an adult was carrying you like a bag of groceries.
“Okay,” she said.
Coach put her down, but made sure to stay between her and the football field.
“Can I just say one more thing?” Em said, looking up at Coach.
“Sure,” he said.
She leaned around him, and yelled one last thing in Matt’s direction.
“Freak!”
Tommy looked at Coach and smiled.
“That’s my little sister right there,” he said.
• • •
On the car ride home after the game, Mom talked about how proud she was that Emily had wanted to defend her brother, and how she had reminded everybody at the game how the Gallaghers look out for each other.
“But,” she said.
Tommy had been waiting for the but.
Em sighed.
“But,” their mom said, “no matter how angry you are, you can’t go running out on the field.”
“I didn’t make it to the field.”
“You can’t go running after players on the other team,” Mom said, “no matter what they’ve done to your brother.”
“I just wanted to give him one good kick.”
“I would’ve liked to have seen that,” Tommy said, grinning.
They were at a stoplight. Mom turned to him and said, “And this is being helpful . . . how?”
When they were home, though, and Em was up in her room, their mom looked at Tommy and jerked her head toward the kitchen. Then she closed the door behind them and said, “Oh yeah!” and gave Tommy a huge high five.
“What happened at that field today,” his mom said, “was awesome.”
“I knew you weren’t really mad!” Tommy said.
“Oh, I meant everything I said in the car,” she said. “But what she did, as mad as she got, the way she shot out of the stands to defend you, it was like I was watching her come back to life.” She shook her head. “Better late than never.”
“And it was all just because of one late hit.”
“It wasn’t even that,” she said. “It was because she didn’t want anything to happen to you.”
“Well, whatever the reason, now I think Coach wants to sign her up for the team,” Tommy said. “She’s as fast as any of our wideouts.”
“Let’s just keep her as an honorary member of the Bears,” she said. “I’m still holding out hope that she’ll be a soccer player again before the season’s over.”
“Me too.”
He reached into his pocket and checked his phone. There was a text from Mike, asking him if he wanted to go over to the bowl at Cleveland Circle.
“You heading out?”
“Yeah,” he said.
Tommy had other ideas, though. He’d catch Mike another time.
He walked out of the kitchen and up the stairs. For once, the door to Em’s room was open.
“Hey,” he said, “thanks for defending me today.”
“They should have tossed that jerk out of the game the way you got tossed a few weeks ago.”
“Nah,” Tommy said. “As dumb as Matt was, I was dumber for starting a fight.”
She shook her head. “Blake Winthrop talked about Dad.”
“He didn’t mean it.”
“I don’t care,” Em said. “He said it. If I’d heard him I would have tried to take him down, too.”
Tommy knew there was no convincing her once she dug her feet in.
“Can I ask you a question?” he said.
“What?”
“What were you really gonna do if nobody had stopped you and you got a real shot at Matt?”
“Like I said, I would’ve kicked him.”
Tommy smiled at his sister. “Where?”
For once, she smiled back. “Don’t ask.”
“Can I ask you something else?”
“What is this, Twenty Questions?”
“Want to go over to Rogers Park and kick a ball around, instead of your new friend Matt Foley?”
“Sure,” she said.
She was full of surprises today.
THIRTY-FIVE
WITH ONE WEEK TO GO in the regular season, they were one
win away from a rematch with Blake Winthrop and Wellesley in the championship game.
If the Bears could win their last regular season game against Waltham, the worst team in their league, and Wellesley could beat Brookline, the two teams would play for the title. And the Bears would play at home. Even though the two teams would end up with the same record if they both won, in a tie for first, the Bears would have the number-one seed because they’d beaten the Wildcats.
No matter how they’d beaten them.
However things turned out, Tommy knew there would never be another season like this in his life. And he knew he never wanted to go through anything like it again. But he’d made it through, late hits and all, and that’s what counted most.
It wasn’t as if he’d done anything great or heroic by making it through everything that had happened. But he’d still made it. Winning or losing the rest of the way wasn’t going to change that. Didn’t mean he didn’t want to win bad.
Just two more games and it would all be over. Tommy didn’t like to dwell too much on what was going to happen after the season ended. He was a decent basketball player, and liked playing basketball well enough, but he knew that he mostly played just to have a winter sport, and to still be on a team with Greck and some of his other friends. Basketball would be just another way to stay busy.
But Tommy knew that he wouldn’t just be losing football soon. Once winter came, and snow came with it, he’d be losing skateboarding, too.
So win or lose, he was going to make the most of the season he had left.
Coach Fisher had talked about that at the end of their last practice before the Waltham game.
“I don’t know how many teams you boys are going to play on in your lives,” he said. “High school or college or maybe even the pros, if you’re good enough and lucky enough. But no matter where you go from here, one thing will never change: You only get so many chances to win in sports. So I want all of you to appreciate this chance you’ve got, because seasons like this are promised to no one.”
It isn’t just sports, Tommy thought when Coach said that. He’d found out this year that nothing was promised to anybody.
Period.
He and his dad were supposed to have had this season together, all the ups and downs of it. His dad was supposed to have been up there in his corner of the stands, like always. He was supposed to have been Tommy’s eyes in the sky, seeing things that nobody else was seeing, picking up on things the other team was doing, then coming down at halftime and telling Tommy if he thought the offense had any tells.
Only now he wasn’t there. And no matter how much support he had from the people around him, there was still a big part of Tommy that felt as if he was going at this alone.
Tommy had looked up at that corner of the stands less and less as the season went on. But sometimes he couldn’t help himself. He wondered if he’d ever break the habit completely.
Or if he would ever want to.
• • •
The game took place in Waltham, not too far from Route 128, on what was by far the coldest Saturday of the season so far.
“I feel like we’re in Green Bay,” Greck said after they warmed up. Even with a warm-up they were still freezing their butts off.
“Are you kidding?” Mike said. “Going to Green Bay today would probably feel like going to the beach.”
The Waltham Bengals had only won two games all season. But in Tommy’s mind that just made them the most dangerous possible opponent today. They knew what was on the line for the Bears. Tommy figured they would like nothing better than to spoil Brighton’s championship hopes. He had a feeling they were going to play like it was their championship game.
The Bengals came out fired up, and even though Tommy and his teammates had heard they were a running team, they came out throwing instead. And throwing just about everything in their playbook at the Bears.
They ran end arounds. There was a fake punt. Even an onside kick after their first touchdown. Their quarterback was a kid named Jack Reaves, who used to live in Brighton and had played with Tommy and Greck and some of the other guys when they were ten.
The trick plays kept on coming. Twice Jack rolled to his right, stopped, and threw back across the field to one of his wide receivers, behind the line of scrimmage, and then he took off and became a downfield receiver himself, the quarterback and receiver swapping roles. On the second one, Tommy wasn’t fooled, but even then, it took a perfect leap from him at the last second to save a touchdown.
The Bengals weren’t playing like one of the worst teams in their league. They were looking like they could hang with the best of ’em. Come to think of it, that’s exactly what they were doing.
At halftime it was the Bears 21, Bengals 20, the highest-scoring game they’d played all year. It was the kind of game Tommy hated—mostly offense, not nearly enough defense.
“These guys are trying to take something from us!” Greck said at halftime.
“You mean like our season?” Tommy said.
“Listen,” Mike said, “we just need to tell ourselves that the game is starting all over again right now, nothing-nothing.”
“We’re not starting anything over,” Tommy said. “We’re going to finish it. Finish them off.”
The Bears defense buckled down in the third quarter, but so did the Bengals’ defense. The game was still 21–20 at the end of the quarter, and halfway into the fourth. The Bears were less than one quarter away from the championship game. A couple of Brighton parents had come down at halftime to tell Coach Fisher that the Wildcats had already won their game over Brookline. They’d punched their ticket to the big game.
Coach Fisher just shrugged. “Only game I care about is the one I’m watching.”
The Bears still couldn’t add to their lead, though. Tommy didn’t know how many first downs Nick and the offense had gotten in the second half. But it wasn’t many. You could probably count them on one hand. With two minutes left, the Bengals stopped them again. And the Bears punted the ball away.
Again.
One defensive stand was all that separated Brighton from the championship game.
But if the Bears were going down in their last game, they were going to empty out their playbook once and for all.
On first down from their forty-yard line, Jack Reaves rolled to his right, flipped the ball back to the wide receiver coming behind him from his right, who seemed to have a lot of open field in front of him if he could get around the corner.
Only then he stopped, threw the ball back to Jack on a flea-flicker, who then threw one deep and down the field to his tight end, who was ahead of the whole Bears secondary.
But the ball was slightly underthrown, which was the difference maker. The tight end had to come back upfield to make the catch, which allowed Mike enough time to tackle him. Still, when Mike finally caught him from behind, Waltham’s tight end had made it all the way to the Bears’ twenty-two-yard line.
Coach called one of his last two time-outs just to let everybody regroup. He waved Tommy and Greck, his defensive co-captains, over to the sideline.
Coach looked at them and smiled. “Now it’s a defensive game,” he said. “Would you want it any other way?”
“No way,” Tommy said.
“No, sir!” Greck said.
“If he lines up in the shotgun again,” Coach said, “we’re going to do what we’ve done all year, and come at him with everything we’ve got.”
Then Coach lightly smacked the top of their helmets, telling them to get back out there.
In Tommy’s mind, it was him against his old friend Jack Reaves the rest of the way.
Jack was in the shotgun on first down. The Bears blitzed. Tommy was a step away from getting the sack before Jack managed to throw the ball away. As he did, Tommy made sure to cut to his left to avoid contact, making sure not to touc
h the Bengals’ quarterback. No more penalties, especially not now, with everything on the line.
Jack was in the shotgun again on second down, but he crossed up Tommy and his fellow defenders by handing the ball to the tailback standing right next to him. Perfect draw play. The kid ran past Tommy and Greck and the rest of the Bears’ rush, all the way to the ten-yard line.
One minute left, straight up. The Bengals didn’t call time, not wanting to ruin their momentum. On first and goal, just before the snap, Jack looked to his right for a split second. It was so quick that most people would’ve missed it. Jack took the snap and threw in the direction of the wide receiver on that side of the field. The receiver made the grab for five more yards, D.J. bringing him down before he could get out of bounds.
The Bengals’ coach used one of his remaining time-outs.
And now Tommy looked past his mom and his sister and up toward the empty corner of the stands that used to be Patrick Gallagher’s domain. And wondered what his dad would want him to see right now.
Wondered what his dad would have seen from up there.
Suddenly Tommy heard his dad’s voice inside his head, telling him something Yankees Hall-of-Famer Yogi Berra had once said: You can observe a lot by watching.
I’m missing something, Tommy told himself.
But what?
And then he knew, on second down, as Jack Reaves eyeballed his tight end from behind center, straightened up, had him open on a slant, but threw the ball behind him for an incompletion.
Jack had looked at his tight end for a split second, so fast most of the guys on the field probably missed it.
But not Tommy Gallagher.
Third and goal, and Jack was under center again. Looking in the direction of his tight end again. And Tommy knew he was going back to him because on his last few throws Jack had looked at his intended receiver right before the snap.
Jack straightened up as soon as he had the ball in his hands and almost started throwing in the same motion, not even worried about getting his feet set.