It was still the same gym, Danny thought, but a lot had changed. He’d spent an awful lot of hours in this gym, although it had been a long time before. He’d been a twelve-letter Spearfish Lake Marlin athlete, football, wrestling, and baseball. Basketball hadn’t exactly been his strong sport, and he’d never been the kind of athlete his older sister was.

Danny knew there were people who thought his father was the best athlete the school had ever produced, although more than fifty years ago, and they were getting thinned out by age, now. A much bigger number thought the school’s best athlete ever was his older sister, Brandy. Danny wouldn’t quite count himself among that group, but was quite willing to admit that she was the best he’d ever seen while he’d been following Marlin sports.

Brandy had, among other things, been responsible for what some people considered the high point of Marlin sports history, when in the state softball finals in 1983, she’d belted a three-run homer, hitting a pitch intended as an intentional pass in the bottom of the ninth for a come-from-behind victory over Camden St. Dismas, the only playoff-determined state team championship the school had ever won.

Danny had been a little surprised to hear that Brandy had taken over coaching the Marlin girls’ basketball team, but in a couple of phone calls home last fall, he’d gotten the outline of the story. For two years, there had been no boys’ or girls’ basketball, the result of a complicated lawsuit. Last year was the first time in three years they’d had a basketball team, either boys or girls, and the results had been dismal. The boys went 0-20; the girls went 0-12 in terms of games actually played before so many girls quit the team that they couldn’t find enough to play the last games of the season. Bad blood over the lawsuits caused the old coach to leave, although he hadn’t been anything to write home about, anyway, and finding a new coach who didn’t have axes to grind had proved to be almost impossible.

It had been literally almost the last minute before practice began for the fall girls’ basketball season when Harold Hekkinan, the high school principal and athletic director, realized that not only was Brandy back in town from her world-traveling job, she’d quit it and wasn’t planning on going anywhere soon – and she hadn’t been around for any of the lawsuit, so presumably no one was upset with her. In desperation, he asked if she’d be willing to coach the teams. It turned out she was getting a lot desperate for something to do, and jumped on it – adding to the legend of Brandy Evachevski in the process.

Outside of the progress of Jennifer’s pregnancy, it had been the main news that Danny had been hearing from Spearfish Lake all fall. Considering all the bad news from the year before, Brandy had only seven girls show up for practice the first day. All were younger girls; none seemed to have terrific potential as basketball players; only two had ever played in organized school basketball, as seventh graders. To Brandy, that meant that they were seven lumps of clay for her to mold and didn’t have many bad habits to unlearn. She worked hard with them, trying to maximize each girl’s talents, teaching them some tricks that don’t often show up in high school basketball along the way – and most important, teaching to think of themselves as a true team.

The end result was the stuff of legend. Last year’s team, for practical purposes, had gone 0-20; this year, Brandy’s "Magnificent Seven" went 26-3, with the last loss a very near miss in the state semifinals! Since all of the girls were freshmen and sophomores, Spearfish Lake was already the odds-on favorite to take the state championships next year – that, in fact, had been the last news he’d gotten out of Spearfish Lake before he’d discovered Marsha with Sheena.

Danny knew that Brandy was set to coach the boys’ team as well – and that was something you don’t see very often in high school sports, a woman coaching a boys’ team, although there never seemed to be any shortage of men coaching girls’ teams. She expected that she’d have a tough act to follow.

It wasn’t until Danny walked into the familiar gymnasium with his folks that he found out it seemed to be going pretty well so far – the boys were 6-2, and just getting their feet back under them following the Christmas break.

Walking into this gym was like coming home. There were people there he knew, faces he recognized. Half a dozen or more people stopped him on the way in, greeted him, asked how he was doing, how long he was back for, etc. It turned out that his divorce from Marsha wasn’t common knowledge, but a couple of people had heard about it, and he didn’t try to hide it.

They found seats up in the stands, right behind the bench. As it turned out, in the row behind them and off to the side a little were three people that he knew: Terry and Wendy Curtis – she’d been Johansen when she was in his class, although Terry was a few years older, in Brandy’s class; and Anissa Petersen, who he knew was married, but couldn’t think of her new last name. Anissa was also in Brandy’s class, and the two girls had been the school’s first female twelve-letter athletes, and, he soon found out, Anissa was now the sports editor for the Record-Herald.

"Danny!" Wendy spoke up, "good to see you! What have you been doing with yourself?"

"Just got back after a while in Nevada," he told her, heading over to talk with them for a minute – after all, he figured now was as good a time as any to get started on the process of becoming a local again. "So far it’s good to be back."

"What were you doing in Nevada?" Wendy asked.

"Getting a divorce," Danny admitted.

"I take it congratulations are in order," Terry smiled.

"You could say that," Danny smiled. "I’m back here for a while, maybe to stay."

"Good to have you back," Anissa said. Danny didn’t know her exceptionally well; she was far enough ahead of him that they hadn’t been in the same groups in school, although he remembered her fairly well from when she hung around with Brandy. Now that he’d thought about it for a moment, he remembered that she’d married Dean Hodges right out of school. "You came to watch the fun, I take it."

"Haven’t heard much about what’s happened with the boys’ season," Danny admitted. "I take it they’re doing all right?"

"Lots better than last year," Anissa told him. "But it’s Spearfish Lake basketball, so there has to be controversy."

"What’s controversial?" Danny asked. "Like I said, I don’t know much about what’s been going on here, but 6-2 after a goose-egg last year sure doesn’t sound bad."

"You’d think so," Terry snorted. "But like Anissa said, this is Spearfish Lake basketball. There have been so many people pissed off at so many other people for so long that nobody can break the habit. Brandy came in here with the goal of re-establishing a winning tradition in basketball, and of course that pissed off a lot of people."

"How can that happen?"

"Spearfish Lake basketball," Anissa snorted. "She ignored some seniors and juniors in favor of some freshmen and sophomores who are motivated and know how to play basketball. So, of course, that pissed off the Athletic Boosters, especially those with kids she ignored."

"Yeah," Danny nodded. "That would do it, all right."

"Especially in the atmosphere we’ve had here," Terry agreed. "Of course it’s been open warfare between your sister and the Athletic Boosters right since the beginning of the girls’ season, anyway."

Between the three of them, Terry and Wendy and Anissa told Danny that the Athletic Boosters, which usually paid for all the team uniforms, had thought so little of the girls’ basketball team’s chances that they hadn’t bothered to buy new uniforms, or even wash and repair the old ones after the season collapsed the fall before. Brandy was not about to have the girls have their fragile egos slapped like that, so she ordered new basketball uniforms out of her own pocket, and issued the girls’ volleyball team uniforms to use temporarily. After the new uniforms arrived, the seven girls – Anissa’s daughter Sarah was among them – got their heads together, and asked to keep wearing the volleyball uniforms as a token of solidarity, to show that they and their coach believed in them when no one else would.

"So, all season long, the girls advertised how cheap the Athletic Boosters were," Anissa snorted. "Right on to the floor of Jones Arena in the state semis. I didn’t say anything in the Record-Herald about uniforms that read ‘Lady Marlin Volleyball’, but you can bet several other papers did, including the Camden Press and the Decatur News. They uncovered the story and made a big deal out of it."

"That would do a good job of pissing people off, wouldn’t it?" Danny laughed.

"It did," Terry said. "But it was one of the things that made the girls a team and took them to the semis in the first place."

"Darn right," Wendy grinned. "There’s nothing like a little ‘us against the world’ to build solidarity. I don’t doubt that your sister knew that, even though I don’t think she planned it, like the Athletic Boosters charged."

"It even went to the school board, with the Athletic Boosters pissing and moaning about the girls not wearing the new uniforms," Terry explained. "Of course, they’re uniforms that Brandy owns, not the school or the Athletic Boosters, so they really don’t have a leg to stand on."

"God, Spearfish Lake small-town bitching and whining," Danny shook his head. "It’d be sad if I hadn’t missed it so much."

"That wasn’t all of it," Anissa told him. "They got three or four games into the season, winning all of them, and then some of the girls who had quit wanted to hop on board since they were now winning."

"And, since they were juniors and seniors, they thought the freshman and sophomores ought to get out of their way," Danny nodded understandingly.

"Damn right," Terry said. "And it wouldn’t even be that easy. Brandy had taught the seven a modified broad-front run-and-gun offense with a lot of fakes that was hard to counter, but it was all based on the differing individual strengths of the various girls. It depends a lot on knowing what everyone else can do and is likely to do. They worked their butts off to develop it, and it worked, but you just don’t dump a stranger into the middle of a system like that and expect it to still work."

"And there was the solidarity issue again," Anissa added. "I mean, the seven girls had worked their butts off to get where they were; why should someone else expect to come in with no practice and get on their bandwagon? Hell, I don’t blame Brandy, I know from Sarah that she could have lost all seven girls if she’d knuckled under to the Boosters, and she knew it too. But nobody pushes your sister around."

"I sure know that," Danny laughed, settling down on the bleachers; this was turning into an interesting discussion. "I mean, I grew up knowing that, it’s no surprise to me."

"It gets worse," Anissa sighed. "No one still quite takes girls’ sports seriously, even in spite of all this. Boys’ sports, they take seriously."

Again, the three of them filled Danny in on the rest. The hassles had started even before the beginning of the season; after all, a woman coach, even one who was one of the Marlins’ greatest stars ever and had turned a losing program into a shot at the state finals in one year – should she really be coaching something as important as boys’ sports?

It got worse. With only seven girls on the team in the early fall – the girl’s basketball season in Michigan, Brandy had put together a small group of boys, again mostly freshmen and sophomores who didn’t play football, for the Lady Marlins to scrimmage with. They’d gone through months of the same drills, and learned the same offense – in fact, were about the only team around that had any realistic idea of how to defend against it.

"I think I see the problem," Danny grinned.

"You’re probably seeing right," Anissa nodded. "She was building the core of the varsity boys’ team in the process of building the girls’ team. The football team got their butts shot off again, and when football season ended, a bunch of football players showed up at the first official basketball practice with the idea that they were going to be the varsity. Brandy put a stop to that shit real quick. You should have been there. I was, she tipped me off. It was obscene."

At the first practice, Brandy set up a scrimmage, the older players, former football players and team members from the previous year on one side, and the younger players she’d been training on the other – and then, rather than running them up against each other, ran them up against the Magnificent Seven, just back from their loss in the state semis, changing off in quarters. The older boys scored a total of four points, and what the girls did to them was not pretty. The younger boys won one quarter by one point, and lost the other one by two points.

"There were several other things," Terry added. "Like she benched several guys for grades, she keeps a tighter rule than the board set. And, the Athletic Boosters bitched about that, just like they bitched about the varsity boys being made up of freshmen and sophomores and the JVs being made up of junior and senior football players. That went to the board, too."

"I don’t know how much money Phil and Brandy have," Anissa laughed, "but it’s enough that they don’t have to be scared of her job. Brandy did relent a little bit, and said that she’d bring someone with promise up from JVs, and she’d send any slackers down from Varsity if she needed to. She has moved a couple of kids, but they’re not any of the Athletic Boosters’ kids. She did switch the teams around in two non-league games over the holidays, so the JV kids could get varsity letters for the year, and that’s where the two varsity losses this year come from. So, yeah, I think it’s fair to say that your sister is just a little controversial in this town right now."

"It’ll probably sort itself out in a year or two," Wendy shrugged. "And there’ll be a serious, solid program left behind. But it has gotten a little nasty in the interim."

Whooo, boy, Danny thought after the three had finished filling him in on the background. Brandy sure has herself a tough row to hoe on this one! Of course, Brandy was a person who liked it tough, relished a fight like that, and didn’t put up with any nonsense. And, he also now understood why his father went to the games, usually accompanied by a couple of the other guys who worked out upstairs above Spearfish Lake Appliance – no Athletic Booster parent was likely to get into Brandy’s face too much with that kind of fire support hanging around.

It was like he’d told Terry: he’d missed it. People in Spearfish Lake took their high school sports seriously – probably too seriously, he thought now, but he hadn’t felt that way when he’d been a running back for the football Marlins long before. But he could not have told you where the local school had been in Ft. Pierce, what their team name was, what kind of record they’d had – and he could not have cared less, and not just because Marsha kept him preoccupied.

Finally, the JV team came onto the court, and Brandy and some guy Danny didn’t recognize sat down on the bench in front of them. Anissa explained it was Earl Weaver, a retired baseball coach from Albany River, brought in more to keep an eye on things in the locker room than to do any real coaching – Brandy effectively coached both the Varsity and the JVs.

As she was settling in, Brandy saw Danny sitting up in the stands. "Welcome home, bro!" she called to him. "Good to see you. I can’t talk now, but we’ll get in some one on one tomorrow!"

"Looking forward to it," he called back. "Knock ’em dead."

The game got under way. Realistically, it was pretty even, and if you got down to it, a pretty good game, a tight battle that didn’t get settled until near the buzzer. On the home court, the Marlin JVs did pull out a close win, one that would have been more impressive if you forgot that generally speaking, considering the ages of the kids involved, that the JVs would normally have been the Marlin Varsity, and they were playing younger opponents.

It was halfway through the game before Danny realized there was something missing – the visiting team had cheerleaders with them, but there were no home cheerleaders. That made Danny wonder a little, and at a break in the action, asked Anissa about it.

"Oh, Christ, don’t get me started," Anissa told him. "That’s what touched off the whole basketball lawsuit business in the first place. Three years ago, the girls’ team was pretty good, and went to Districts. Since the football team was doing for shit, a couple of the parents asked Hekkinan to send the cheerleaders to the Girls’ District finals instead. He thought that was a good idea, and told them to do it. The girls wanted to be with their boyfriends, though, and went to the football game instead. The next thing you know, we’re up to our ass in lawsuits, and we’re still under an injunction that we can’t have cheerleaders."

"I did kind of miss them a little," Terry told him. "But I’ve discovered that they kind of detract from the game, too, so I don’t know how anxious I am to have them back."

"You better watch where you say that," Anissa snorted. "I can think of a bunch of mothers who would wring your neck if they heard you."

At the break between the JV and Varsity games, Danny got up and went back down to sit with his parents and his brother-in-law, Phil. Like a lot of people, he knew Phil from pre-Marsha days, but hadn’t seen much of him in the past few years – not more than a few minutes last summer, since Phil wouldn’t go out to the Club. "Good to see you back," the thin, lanky, dark-haired guy said.

"Good to be back," Danny replied, "especially single again. So how goes it with the dogs?"

"The core team is coming along pretty well," Phil said. "We’re trying to concentrate on one group of dogs more this year than we have in the past, and it seems to be working out so far. Of course, how good it is we won’t know till we get to Alaska, but Josh and Tiffany and I are pretty satisfied at this point."

He knew that Phil had gotten bitten by the dog sledding bug at some point in the distant past, probably while Danny was in college. Even though he had a job that had taken him around the world time and time again, gone most of the time, Phil had worked with Josh and Tiffany when he’d been home. And, Josh and Tiffany gave him credit for a lot of their success, since his job had taken him to Alaska on several occasions, and he’d turned up several Alaskan dogs that had proven to be the core of Josh and Tiffany’s breeding program. Two years ago, he’d quit the job, came back to Spearfish Lake, and asked Josh and Tiffany to put together an Iditarod team for him. It had been too late to get started two years before, but they gave him a heckuva team last year, one that he’d taken to seventeenth place – not rookie of the year, but a top-twenty finish for a rookie from outside was pretty impressive.

"Yeah," Danny said. "I can’t tell you when the last time I saw Josh and Tiffany working the dogs in the winter must have been, but it had to have been ten years ago, at least. I want to get out and check it out some time."

"It’s changed a lot," Phil told him. "The dogs are so much better now than they were ten years ago that it’s not funny. We’re still training at Josh and Tiffany’s this winter, so take a run out to their place when you get a chance. We’re out on the trail a lot, so don’t be too surprised if there’s no one around, though." He looked thoughtful for a second, and then added, "Tomorrow morning might be a good time, somebody will be around some of the time and will probably have a good idea of who is going to be where when."

"I’ll have to give it some thought," Danny told him. "I don’t exactly have winter clothes for Spearfish Lake anymore. That’s something I’m going to have to deal with tomorrow. Anyway, I’ve just been up talking with Terry and Wendy Curtis and Anissa Hodges. They tell me that Brandy’s been having a few adventures with the basketball team."

"Yeah, a lot of close games," Phil nodded. "Some of them really get the heart rate up. I suppose they told you about some of the flak that Brandy has been catching, too."

"Yeah, I got a pretty good summary," Danny nodded.

"It’s not all that bad," Phil sighed. "A few people making a pain in the ass of themselves. We had a few like that down at Arvada Center when I was in high school, too. Most people see it as the miracle that it really is."

The Varsity game turned out to be interesting too – a close-fought thriller that went down to the final buzzer, resulting also in a Marlin win. Again, Danny thought it was interesting as it was what really should have been the Marlin JVs against the visiting Varsity – if the age groups had been matched properly, both games would have been a lot more one-sided, but what would have been the Marlin Varsity would likely have had their butts shot off, too. But he could also see it from the viewpoint of the parents of some of the kids who got the short end of the stick.

All in all, most everybody was in a pretty good mood by the end of the evening. Danny pretty well decided that he’d plan on going to a few more basketball games while the season lasted; it seemed to be a good way to see some people he used to know, and start becoming a local again – preferably one who didn’t take his basketball too seriously.

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