Two-fer. Read up.
Justin Heckert: Behind the empty bleachers he parks his green pickup truck and cuts the engine, spits Copenhagen into an empty plastic water bottle. He opens the door and stretches his legs. He pulls down the hatch on the bed of the truck and sits there for a minute, exhaling into the cold. He’s leaving home in two days, leaving Versailles, Ky., driving 1,200 miles to start over again. He is moving to Laramie and walking on to the Wyoming football team, to try and kick field goals. It’s been six years since he came home from the war, since he reintegrated into civilian life. He unties his tennis shoes, replaces them with a pair of black cleats, rolls his athletic socks up to just below his knees. In the pictures back in his house, on the walls of his neatly kept bedroom, he is a tall man in a Kevlar vest with SAPI plates, and grenades strapped to his chest, an M-16 cradled in his hands. In the desert. On the other side of the world.
T Lake: If you’re like me an my older brother, you’ve waited all your life for something that may never come. Nothing you do can make it happen; no amount of screaming or holding your breath. This thing is small—meaningless, compared with cancer or hurricanes—but we still care about it, desperately, a little more with each passing year. We are waiting for a championship, a ticker-tape parade, a license to dance in the streets of the city we call home. Just once we wish we could be the best.
Today I’m writing about our favorite team, the Atlanta Falcons, playing since 1966 and still without a Super Bowl victory, but I could just as easily be writing about your favorite team. You are loyal and unwavering. Your team is your birthright, your fate, and you would never jump on anyone else’s bandwagon. You would rather wait 44 years with your Jets than have anything to do with the Giants. You are from San Diego, Sacramento, Seattle. You bought season tickets for the ’86 Clippers and actually showed up. You were born in 1909 on the North Side of Chicago, and you’ll go to your grave without acknowledging that the White Sox exist. You are the Vikings, the Lions, the Buffalo Bills. You are the city of Cleveland.
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