Chapter 38

In the twenty years Spearfish Lake had had a girls’ cross-country team, and the twelve that John Emerson had been coaching it, no team had ever been to the state meet, although a few girls, like Bree the previous year, had been to it as individuals. Since Bree had been there the year before, she had some knowledge that could serve the team as a guide.

It was a long trip down to the southern part of the state. Since half a dozen team members were going, along with the coach, some parents, and others, there was no thought of using Rocinante like Bree and Mark had the year before. No one even wanted to think about riding a school bus that far, so the team set off in a caravan of cars.

Michigan International Speedway looked big from the outside, but seemed even more awesome when they drove through the tunnel into the infield. Like the year before the place seemed huge and empty, overwhelming the hundreds of runners and supporters from all over the state clustered in a seeming huddle of tents and awnings in the infield. The girls in their division didn’t run until later in the morning of the chilly November day, so mostly they stood around in sweats and jackets, trying to psych themselves up for their event. Once again, Bree’s having been there before made things go a little easier for her and the team.

Finally, the girls in their event lined up along the course’s starting line, stretching and exercising to get cold-stiff muscles warmed up for what was sure to be a fast race. Even Bree was more excited than usual. In a way, it was surprising that she’d gotten this far; two years before she’d never thought of herself as an athlete at all, and had only gone out for cross-country to pad out her list of accomplishments. Now, she stood a chance of medaling for the second year in a row. She wished that Jared could be there, but she knew that he was at home, getting set for the regional game against Salem, a school they’d never played before.

The final seconds were counted down over a loudspeaker; the starter raised his gun, and fired it. Bree took off in a crowd of other girls, but at least toward the front. In only the first couple hundred meters the field began to sort itself out, and Bree found herself running near the top of the order, trying to remember to run her own pace, and not go too fast too early.

By the one-kilometer mark the wisdom of running her own pace was starting to pay off; she was up to fifth, as some girls who had made jackrabbit starts began to fade. From there on, it was just a case of keeping going at a fast but steady pace along the course.

Bree was running third when she hit the four-kilometer mark; two other girls were only meters ahead of her, and the three of them had outdistanced the rest of the pack by a hundred meters or so. She didn’t even think about the fact that she now was pretty well assured of a place no lower than third; all she could think about was trying to figure out a way to get ahead of the two girls in front of her. In the next half-kilometer, the girl who had been running in front most of the way started to fade, soon she was second, and only a few moments later Bree passed her as well, gaining on the girl who was leading.

The finish line was in sight; Bree mentally dropped down a gear, reaching for strength she wasn’t sure she had, putting everything into her run. Slowly, inch by inch she gained on the leader as the last half-kilometer raced by. They were side by side as they ran down the pennant marked lane toward the finish line; it was going to be close . . .

. . . and it was. The two girls were side by side as they crossed the finish line; Bree could not tell if she’d won, and right at that moment really was in no shape to think about it very much. She was exhausted from her all-out effort to make it to the finish. She’d given everything she had, and it had proved to be barely enough, just barely enough, so little that it could hardly be measured. She wasn’t even aware of how close it had been; she was much too busy breathing hard, hands on her knees, trying to restore a little oxygen to her system. Somewhere in there the thought crossed her mind that she wished she’d had the oxygen system that had kept her alive at thirty thousand feet in the Pike’s Peak wave – right now she could use it!

After a few moments she started to become aware of her surroundings, or at least something more than the desperate need to breathe. She looked around; her uncle Mark and aunt Jackie were there, with huge grins on their faces. “Who won?” she managed to gasp.

“We don’t know,” Mark told her. “They’re reviewing a videotape of the finish.”

The last girls in the race were finishing and the next race was lining up when there came an announcement. “The judges have reviewed the tape of the finish, and your winner by five one-thousandths of a second is Brianna Gravengood of Spearfish Lake.”

“My God!” Bree puffed. “I won?” The reality hit her only slowly as her aunt and uncle gathered her in their arms. “I won! I WON!”

The other girls on the team and Coach Emerson were all gathered around with huge smiles on their faces as the announcer continued to read off the top finishers. Then he had a surprise for them that caught everyone unaware. “With first place settled, that means that Spearfish Lake wins the 2012 state division title by one point. Second was . . .”

Bree and the rest of the girls on the team looked at each other in shock. Bree had been so wasted she hadn’t even been aware of the rest of the team – all she’d been able to think was that the three freshmen girls were expected to do well – and they had. All of a sudden the reality hit them; they were screaming and jumping and holding onto each other, mad with excitement, somewhere finding the energy to celebrate their accomplishment of what they’d thought was unthinkable. They were the state champions, and Bree was THE state champion!

There was a small stand not far from the finish where the medals and trophies were awarded; officials herded them toward it, where Bree, as team captain, was handed first the team trophy, and then her individual one. She held both of them high, as camera shutters snapped, thinking that to her this may not have been as big an accomplishment as the diamond pin that she’d worn on her running suit for good luck – but at least this one was something people would understand. That wasn’t bad for something she’d started on a whim!

Once the award ceremony had taken place, the girls and their supporters gathered around Coach Emerson. “Wow,” he said to the girls. “One point. Do you realize what that means? It means that everyone had to do their best for every place they could get, but that every place counted. Each and every one of them. You girls won this, and I’ll tell you what, this is going to look pretty good in the trophy case at the school. You girls . . . every one of you – deserve all the credit, but I really have to thank Bree for being an inspiration to the team, and helping to drive everyone to do their best. You couldn’t have won this without all of you being in it to the peak of your ability, and that especially means Bree for her outright win. I’ve always thought that running is fun and gives you a sense of accomplishment that’s secondary to winning. But I’ll tell you what, it’s nice to watch you winning!”

The girls hung around the meet for a while, their first place medals hanging from ribbons around their necks, just to take in the glow of their accomplishment, but eventually the meet came to an end, people were packing up and getting on the road. Reluctant though they were to leave the scene of their triumph, the Spearfish Lake contingent decided it was time to hit the road, too. It was going to be a long trip home, but it surely was going to be a happy one.

Halfway up the Lower Peninsula they stopped at a rest stop near Clare. “I wonder how the football team is doing?” someone asked.

“No idea,” someone else replied. “The game should be under way by now. I’ll get on my cell and find out.”

A minute or so later, they had the answer. “They’re blowing them out,” was the report. “Twenty-one to zip in the second quarter. I’m told they made the announcement about our winning and we got a huge cheer from the fans.”

It was starting to get dark when they stopped in Mackinaw City for dinner – the same restaurant Bree and her friends had stopped at on the way back from her diamond distance flight, which she thought appropriate even if it didn’t have any meaning to anyone else. Once again, the first question was about the football team. “Blew them out,” one of the parents with a cell phone reported. “There’s people wondering how Salem got this far in the playoffs in the first place.”

“Great,” one of the girls grinned. “Now if they can do just as well as we did, it’d really be neat.”

In spite of the huge victory for the girls’ cross-country team over the weekend, things seemed pretty normal around the school on Monday. As expected, most of the talk around the lunchroom was of the football game, and the team they’d be facing the next weekend. That was even true around the table in the corner where the four friends always sat, this time sharing hot cocoa and Irish stew instead of the normal lunchroom garbage. At least there was some appreciation for Bree’s accomplishment – especially from Jared, who had a state individual championship of his own. Great though that was, Bree felt like she’d done him one better by leading her team to the championship, too, minor though it seemed in comparison to football.

Bree’s season was over with now, ended on a high note, but things went on like they always did. The following weekend the Marlins faced their divisional title game, again at home, and the winning girls’ cross-country team was introduced at halftime, which added a special thrill even though it must have seemed minor to the crowd. The Marlins won their game easily, and headed to Marquette and the Yooperdome for the state semifinals the following weekend. This game was against St. Ursula, the team that had beaten them there the year before, and everyone figured there was some unfinished business to deal with. The Saints had better stats than they’d had the previous year, but so did the Marlins, and that feeling of old scores to settle led to the Marlins winning comfortably, although not by a blowout.

That meant the Marlins were going to the state finals in Detroit! No Spearfish Lake team, not even some of the storied ones from back in the eighties, had ever come close to that! Some of the real old-timers around town contended that the teams back in the mid-fifties might have been better, but there hadn’t been any playoff system back then, so no one could prove it. Spearfish Lake, always crazy about football, just about went nuts!

They didn’t know much about their opponents, the Bradford Bulldogs, a school not far from Hawthorne. Just to be on the safe side, Coach Kulwicki had several people scout the Bradford game the weekend before; they brought back videotapes of that game, and DVDs of some of their other games that season. The coaches, and most of the players, spent a lot of time going over them to learn what they could.

“I can tell you this,” Coach Kulwicki told them. “In a way, they’re a lot like us. Up until two years ago, they were a three and six team, maybe five and four in a good year. They weren’t exactly the league patsies but they didn’t have a big history of winning, either. But then they got a new coach and had several good players come up, and all of a sudden they got good. They won the regionals two years ago, and their division last year. They’ve had a good year, not quite as good as ours, but blew out their opponents in the semis last weekend. I mean, it was sort of like Salem, no one can figure out how their opponents made it to the semis in the first place, especially coming out of the Detroit school leagues, which are always pretty tough.”

“A lot like us,” Coach Reardon agreed. “In that respect, they’re about level with us. However, we’ve got something on them. I’ve gone over the tapes like everyone else, and I’ve called down and talked to some of the people they’ve played, and they’re strictly a running team. They’ve only thrown a couple of passes all season, and that was when the quarterback was on the verge of getting sacked, so they didn’t complete any of them. On the other hand, we can come at them both ways, so we might have the edge offensively.”

“It’s not impossible they might throw a pass or two,” Kulwicki agreed. “But they don’t have an established pass offense. That means we’re going to have to concentrate on defense against them running at us, and they’ve got a couple of real good runners. I mean, real good. I think stopping them, or at least slowing them down, is what we’re going to have to concentrate on.”

“We need to spiff up our passing offense,” Reardon told the team. “From what I learned in talking with the teams down there, nobody there goes to the air very much, so they won’t be used to it. Offensively, that ought to be the key.”

This wasn’t going to be a routine game; it was the state finals, after all, and to a great extent other things got shoved to the side that week. Like the cross-country finals, nobody had much enthusiasm for going over five hundred miles in a school bus and then having to play a game afterwards, but the athletic booster club came through, chartering several highway buses from as far away as Milwaukee. One bus would be reserved for the team and coaches; cheerleaders would be on another bus, along with some other people that had to go along. The boosters sold tickets for the rest of the buses for enough to make up most of the cost, and they sold out quickly. Even with that, hundreds of people planned to drive to Detroit for the game; many people had never been there before, since as far west in the Upper Peninsula as Spearfish Lake was, when most people thought about a big city they thought about Chicago or Milwaukee. This was going to be new territory for almost everyone.

The buses with the team and some of the fans left Spearfish Lake very early on Thursday morning – Thanksgiving Day – for the day-long trip. Even with the relative comfort of the highway coaches, it was a long, hard trip, and everyone was glad to pull into the parking lot of a motel a few miles away from Ford Field the night before the game. On Friday, the teams got a chance to do a brief practice in the ’dome itself, just to get used to the new conditions, although the Marlins thought they might have a leg up on that aspect from having played in the Yooperdome the weekend before. They went back to the motel, and early in the afternoon spent some time working on a few basics in the parking lot.

After the shirttail practice broke up, there was a real surprise for Howie and Jared: they had some people watching them, and among them was Lyle Angarrack, the big player whose kicking had made the difference in the first year of their incredible run. He’d come over from Meriwether College, half the state away, with his girlfriend, Ashley Keilhorn, another veteran of that season, and still the only girl to ever play football in a Marlin uniform. Howie and Jared knew vaguely that Lyle had been having a couple of pretty good seasons as a kicker for Meriwether, even though Ashley wasn’t holding for him. His legacy for the Marlins was still strong: without him, they’d never have built the confidence to get the Marlins as far as they had come. It was darn good to see both of them again.

And if that wasn’t enough, just as they were telling tales about the old days with Lyle and Ashley, who should pull in but the contingent from Hawthorne – Jack, Vixen, Alan, and Summer! “The paper in Hawthorne made a big deal about the Bulldogs,” Jack reported. “According to them, the Marlins are going to be so much dog food. We came over to see you prove them wrong.”

They stood around talking for a few minutes; along in there, Vixen asked, “Did you guys know about the Bradford quarterback?”

“We’ve watched the tapes,” Howie told her. “He doesn’t seem to be anything special.”

“The Hawthorne paper made a big deal out of him. From what I can tell, he doesn’t seem to be anything special as a quarterback, but he’s a cancer survivor. He had it bad, and there’s supposed to be a lot of scars on his body from where he had surgery. It seems that they didn’t really have a quarterback at the beginning of the year, and he sort of volunteered for the job so he wouldn’t have to sit on the bench. From what the story in the paper said, he’s done a solid job, but there’s a lot of sentiment about his courage to hang in there after all he’s been through. He’s supposed to be a really good kid.”

“He’d have to be,” Howie nodded, “to go through all that and still be playing.”

There were some old times to be caught up on as the team had an early dinner. Afterwards several buses loaded up for the trip back to Ford Field, mostly to sit in the stands and watch two other division finals, again to try to get used to the place. Much like Bree had experienced a few weeks before – and she was there, having ridden on one of the fan buses – the arena seemed almost empty in spite of the fact it was the finals. Most of the fans were clustered around the fifty yard line on either side of the field, and still the place almost echoed.

Much like they’d experienced at the Yooperdome, because of their division, the game was played in the morning, although not quite as early. The team was up and ready in plenty of time, had a good breakfast, then boarded the buses back to the arena for the game. This was it, the finals, the thing they’d all been working toward.

The game started out tough, very tough. In the first quarter Howie tried several passes, but the Bulldog pass coverage was better than expected, or luck wasn’t with the Marlins, or whatever. Although Jared and Glen Dollarhyde managed to catch most of them, somehow nothing broke them loose for a score. Toward the end of the first quarter, on fourth and long, Coach Kulwicki called for a field goal attempt. As usual, Howie held for Jared, who easily got the first points of the game on the board, which proved to be the only scoring of the period.

Things began to go a little more the way of the Marlins in the second period, when for once the Marlin pass offense worked against the Bulldogs. Jared kicked the extra point, making the score ten to nothing; the Marlins were ahead, but not by a comfortable margin. That proved to be the score at halftime.

“I don’t want to say we’ve got this game won,” Kulwicki told them in the locker room during halftime. It wouldn’t take much for it to go the other way. We’ve really got to bear down in the second half.”

The flow of the game changed a lot in the second half. The Bulldogs took the kickoff, and a fast runner who had been a problem all through the game caught it and managed to evade all the Marlin attempts to stop him, winding up in the end zone. That put them on the board, although the attempt for a two-point conversion on the extra point attempt was no good.

The Bradford kicker got off a good kick, deep into the end zone, which brought the ball back out to the twenty. The Marlins tried to pass twice, making it for short yardage one time and missing the other, and a run attempt in between also didn’t go much of anywhere, forcing a punt. The Marlins were able to hold the Bulldogs down in the vicinity of their thirty yard line for three plays, which essentially went nowhere, so the Bulldogs were forced to punt, as well.

Or so everyone thought. The Bulldog quarterback, the cancer survivor, had been doing the kicking for the team; he grabbed the toss from the center, held it . . . held it . . . and then launched a long throw downfield to a receiver no one had paid any attention to. He caught it in the clear, and there was no catching him. Once again their extra point conversion was no good, but now the Marlins were down on the scoreboard, 10-12, for the first time since early in the season.

Six plays later the Marlins were ahead again 16-12, mostly on their passing game. Jared missed the extra point kick; he did once in a while, and no one thought too much about it. However, the Bulldogs roared right back, with the cancer survivor quarterback throwing pass after pass, marching the team downfield.

Howie was sitting on the bench, listening to the coaches. “What the hell?” Kulwicki said. “They weren’t supposed to have a passing game.”

“Shit, they don’t,” Reardon replied. “Their run isn’t working, and they’re improvising. That’s twice now the kid has thrown out of a run formation when he didn’t have any reason to pass.”

“What the hell are we going to do about it?”

“Beats the hell out of me,” Reardon replied. “When someone is improvising, sometimes it’s a little hard to tell just what it is they’re improvising.”

The Marlins managed to slow the Bulldog drive, but not stop it; in the middle of the third quarter they managed to get the ball in for a score. That meant the score was now 16-18, with the Marlins on the short end, and a successful two-point conversion for the Bulldogs meant the scoreboard was 16-20.

The offense took the field, with Coach Kulwicki huddling with the defense to try and figure out some way to stop the Bulldog’s passing. The Marlins managed a couple successful series of downs, but were stopped on the Bulldog 32 yard line. This was within Jared’s field goal kicking range, and with Howie holding he at least brought the score to 19-20, which the scoreboard read at the end of the quarter.

The Bulldogs had the ball again early in the fourth, and Coach Kulwicki’s improvised pass defense against the improvised passing offense was having some success – but it was difficult, because that opened them up to a running attack. By the middle of the fourth quarter the Bulldogs scored again, making the score 19-26, although this time the conversion attempt failed.

Time was running out and everyone knew it. There were only seconds left in the fourth quarter when Howie decided there was nothing to do but go for the gold. They set up in a pass formation that had worked in the past, and Howie held the ball as long as he dared before he launched a long one to Glen Dollarhyde, who grabbed it on the twenty and ran it in for the score. That made the score 25-26.

Only seconds remained. Coach Kulwicki called a time-out, gathered the offense together, and told them. “I don’t see any choice but to go for the two point conversion,” he told them. “It’s a risk, but if we kick the extra point it’s going to go into overtime and they’d only have to get lucky once. We know we can beat them on a short pass and this is the time to do it.”

Howie wasn’t sure he agreed with the coach, but didn’t see any better options, either. Only seconds remained; this was the time to do it. The fact that either way this would be his last play in a Marlin uniform never crossed his mind. “All right,” he told his team. “This is it. Let’s do it.”

The team lined up in formation; the center hunched over the ball. Just about everyone in the stadium, on both sides of the field, had their fingers crossed.

Howie took the snap, faded back a little looking for a receiver. Jared was covered, and Dollarhyde only seemed a little more in the open. There weren’t a lot of options and the Bulldog pass rush was coming fast. In an instant he made up his mind, and tossed the ball in Dollarhyde’s direction. A Bradford defender went high to try for an interception, and that may have thrown Dollarhyde off a little bit; he went high himself, got his fingertips on the ball . . .

. . . and couldn’t hold on.

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