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  Teddy took a deep breath. “Then let us try to win it,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Stop calling the game like you’re afraid to lose,” Teddy said.

  Coach took his arm away and got in front of Teddy. But he was smiling.

  “Is that what you think I’ve been doing?”

  “Yes.”

  Coach took a deep breath and let it out. “Even I forget sometimes that it’s your game to win or lose, not mine.”

  “Put the game in my hands,” Teddy said.

  “I knew another quarterback who used to tell our coach the same thing.”

  “I can do this,” Teddy said. “We can do this.”

  The scoreboard operator fixed the clock problem. One of the refs came over and said, “Good to go, Dick.”

  “Slant to Gus,” Coach said to Teddy. “Screen to Jake after that. Post to Gus after that.”

  Teddy nodded. “I won’t let you down.”

  “Haven’t yet, kid,” Coach Gilbert said, and gave him a shove toward the field.

  The slant got them eight yards. The screen got them five more. First down. Gus put a sweet move on the kid covering him, got an inside shoulder on him, got into the clear. Teddy threw him a smoking-hot ball. Gus covered up before he got hit. They were at the Giants’ twenty, clock running. Fine with me, Teddy thought. Let it run.

  He shot a quick look at the sideline. Coach Gilbert just stood there with his arms folded in front of him. Jake was next to him but made no move to bring in the next play. Coach unfolded his arms now and pointed at Teddy.

  Like he was telling him, Your call.

  He knelt in the huddle, looked up at the guys, and said, “Reverse pitch.”

  “Oh baby,” Gus said.

  The play called for a fake handoff to Brian, which Teddy knew had to be stellar, as both of them moved to their right. Then Teddy would pull the ball back and pitch it to Gus, coming behind them, running the other way.

  Gus was at full speed when he caught the ball. As soon as he was outside the line, he read the blocking and the defense perfectly and made a sharp inside cut. One of the Giants’ safeties finally brought him down at the ten yard line.

  Now Coach ran Jake into the game. When he got to the huddle, Teddy said, “Got a play for me?”

  “Nope. Coach just told me to tell you it’s all you now. ‘Your game,’ is what he said.”

  Teddy nodded, leaned into the huddle, and said, “Fake reverse.”

  It was basically the same play. Only instead of pitching the ball to Gus, Teddy was going to keep it and try to get to the outside, maybe all the way to the pylon.

  “It’s like we’re playing behind your house,” Gus said.

  “Yeah,” Teddy said. “Fun, huh?”

  This time Teddy’s best fake was to Gus. Then he pulled the ball down, and the Giants didn’t put him down until he was at the three yard line. Coach called time.

  Fifty seconds left.

  Teddy ran to the sideline. When he got there, Jack handed him his water bottle. Coach waited until Teddy took a quick drink before he said, “You can tell me what you want to run,” he said, “or I can be surprised along with everybody else.”

  Teddy told him the play he wanted to call. He was the quarterback of the Wildcats now, as much as he’d ever been. But he wanted Coach to know he still had a ton of tight end in him.

  “Love it,” Coach said.

  “Me too,” Jack said.

  Teddy tossed his bottle back to Jack. He ran back onto the field, got in the huddle, and told the guys what they were running. He took the snap from Charlie and rolled to his right.

  But then, at the last second, he pitched the ball to Jake, who had the only blocker he needed out in front of him:

  Teddy Madden.

  The only Greenacres kid with a chance to break up the play was their left outside linebacker. Teddy lowered his shoulder and bounced the kid halfway out of the end zone. Jake could have walked in behind him for the score. Wildcats 19, Giants 13. Teddy threw a perfect fade, just over the defense, to Gus in the right corner. Now it was 20–13.

  Jared completed one pass to midfield, just to make the last half minute interesting. After that Gus, put in by Coach as an extra defensive back, intercepted a heave deep down the middle of the field. Teddy came back out to kneel one time. They were more a team today than they’d ever been, even if they were down a former assistant coach. Now they were in the championship game.

  “You do know,” Coach Gilbert said when it was over, “that your dad got himself hurt throwing a block like that one time.”

  “Yeah,” Teddy said. “He told me.”

  “You’re not afraid of very much, are you?” Coach said.

  Teddy looked up at him and said, “Not of getting hurt.”

  Then he went to go find his mom.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  A half hour after they’d gotten home from Holzman Field, his mom came into his room with a paper in her hand.

  “This e-mail was waiting for me when I checked my laptop,” she said. “Your dad asked me to print it out for you. He said that he was afraid if he sent it directly to you, you might delete it.”

  “One more good call by Dad.”

  “According to the time it was sent, he must have written it on the plane.”

  “You can do that?”

  “A lot of planes have Wi-Fi now,” she said. She reached out with the paper. At first Teddy made no move to take it from her.

  “You should read it, Teddy,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “He tells why he had to leave the way he did,” she said. “Or at least why he thinks he had to leave the way he did.”

  He reluctantly took the paper. His mom left the room, closing the door behind her. Teddy held the paper, not looking at it, for what felt like a long time, before he finally began to read.

  Dear Teddy,

  I’m so sorry to have missed the game today. By the time you read this (if you’re reading this), I’m just going to assume you did enough to play the ’Cats into the championship game.

  I wish I could have explained everything to you before I left for the airport at dawn this morning. But everything happened pretty fast late last night, and I wasn’t going to wake you up and have you lose sleep before the big game.

  I’ll try not to bore you with too many details. And at this point you probably don’t care very much about them, anyway. But two job opportunities just happened to come my way in the last couple of weeks. One is in television, with Fox Sports in L.A., and the other is with the Chargers in San Diego. I promise you I didn’t go looking for them, but once they just sort of found me, I felt I owed myself the chance to at least hear what people in both places had to say.

  I don’t expect you to understand, or feel sorry for me, but I just felt like this might be my last opportunity to have to stop smiling at people for a living, and kissing up to them, and trying to sell them things, starting with selling them me.

  The TV job is in production, something I’ve always wanted to try. I think I even mentioned that I wanted to be a boss when I took you and your friends on that tour of ESPN. The opening with the Chargers is vice president in charge of marketing. It would be my chance to finally work in football. It would be marketing. I’d still be a boss.

  The interview with the Chargers isn’t until later this week. But the man interviewing me for Fox was leaving tonight for Australia and won’t be back for over a month. He wanted to have one face-to-face interview with me before he left. So I had to take the first flight out this morning, because he had interviewed everybody else that he was considering except me, and he wanted to make his decision before he came back.

  I know I said I wouldn’t leave you again. And you have to believe this has nothing to do with how much I love you, or how much I want you in my life. Being with you this season has shown me how much I was missing when I didn’t have you in my life.

  I like what I’m doing at ESPN.
Sometimes I like it a lot. But I just need to find out if there’s something out there that I could love.

  I don’t know if I’ll get either one of these jobs. And if I do get one of them, I want you to know that I plan to come back. A lot. Or you could fly out to the West Coast and hang with me whenever it’s convenient for you and your mom.

  You have to trust me on how much I wish I could have been there for you today. But it’s funny: As much as I’ve heard about me being there on the sideline and on the practice field for you this season, I always felt it was the other way around, that YOU were there for ME.

  I guess I need to wrap up. And tell you at the end of this that it’s official now that you turned out to be a much better son than I am a father.

  Call you when I get there.

  Your dad

  He didn’t crumple it up when he finished, or throw it in the wastebasket. He just placed it on his desk and walked downstairs to the kitchen, where his mom was making them both sandwiches for a late lunch.

  “So what did you think?” she said.

  “At least this time he left a note,” Teddy said.

  She came over and sat down at the table across from him. “You okay?” she said.

  “Are you planning on going anywhere?” he said.

  “Only the store later. We’re out of milk.”

  “Then, yeah,” Teddy said to her. “I’m okay.”

  • • •

  His dad called, as promised, right before they were getting ready to order in Chinese food for dinner.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey,” Teddy said.

  “Coach sent me a long text about the game,” his dad said. “Congratulations.”

  “We played well.”

  “He said he even let you call the plays yourself at the very end.”

  “Yeah.”

  There was a long silence now, from both of them. Finally his dad said, “Did you read my e-mail?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did I do a decent job getting you to understand why I had to leave the way I did?”

  Teddy said, “Does it matter?”

  “To me it does.”

  “You gotta do what you gotta do.”

  Another silence, longer than the first one. This time Teddy was the one to end it.

  “Listen, Dad, the bottom line is that I should have expected this,” he said. “I should have known it was only a matter of time before you took off again.”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “It’s not?”

  “You have to understand that this season meant more to me than I could ever possibly explain to you.”

  “Just not quite enough.”

  “That’s not true, champ.”

  “Don’t call me ‘champ,’ ” Teddy said. “I’ve always hated it when you call me that.”

  “It’s not true, Teddy. I’m still going to try to make it back for the championship game.”

  “Don’t bother.”

  “C’mon, you don’t mean that.”

  “I totally mean it,” Teddy said. “I mean stuff I say even if you don’t.”

  He took in some air, blew it out.

  “You quit the team today,” he said to his dad, and hung up.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Teddy hadn’t spoken to his dad since last Saturday night. He’d told his mom that if she heard from him, if he called or e-mailed her to let her know about what had happened with his exciting job opportunities, she should make it clear that he’d been serious about not wanting him to fly back for the championship game. She had promised she would.

  As far as Teddy was concerned, his dad had moved on, and so had he. It turned out that a couple of months of being a full-time dad were all he had in him. Teddy explained all this to his friends: He was through talking about his dad. He just wanted to talk about beating the Norris Panthers and getting one step closer to MetLife Stadium.

  Now, after a week of practice that felt like a blur, it was the night before the championship game against the Panthers, to be played the next afternoon at Holzman Field.

  The Wildcats got home field because they had the better record. If they won tomorrow and stayed unbeaten, they’d also have home field the next week for the county championship.

  If they won that, the next stop wasn’t Holzman, it was MetLife Stadium.

  Mrs. Madden had told Teddy to invite Jack and Cassie and Gus over for dinner. When they finished their burgers, and apple pie and ice cream, Jack asked if anybody wanted to play a little two-on-two football before it got too dark.

  “I don’t see how my mom playing would make the sides even,” Teddy said.

  “Hey,” Alexis Madden said, “I’ve got moves you guys haven’t seen yet.”

  “We don’t need your mom,” Jack said. “All due respect, Mrs. M.”

  “We’ve got three healthy players,” Cassie said. “Who’s the fourth?”

  Jack smiled. “Me,” he said. “I’ve been running. Doc says I can start throwing again.”

  “You can play?” Teddy said.

  “Well, not tackle football,” Jack said. “But I can do anything else. Including beat whichever two guys I’m playing tonight.”

  “No way!” Gus yelled. “Jack is back!”

  “Back in the backyard, anyway,” he said.

  In their minds, Teddy’s backyard would always mean the outfield at Walton Middle. Teddy ran upstairs, grabbed his ball off his bed, and the four of them then ran toward the field, Jack leading the way. It was, Teddy decided, the best possible way to get ready for tomorrow’s game:

  By trying to think about another game, at least for a little while.

  The teams were Teddy and Gus against Jack and Cassie. Teddy told Jack it was only fair, as rusty as he was, to give him the best receiver.

  “Great,” Gus said. “I make you look like a real quarterback all season, and that’s the thanks I get.”

  “I was just kidding,” Teddy said.

  “No,” Cassie said, hands on hips. “You were most certainly not kidding.”

  They did play until dark, running around and complaining when one of the quarterbacks would take too long to throw the ball and then laughing even more. Jack and Cassie finally won when Cassie intercepted a ball Teddy badly underthrew, mostly because he wanted the game to be over.

  Cassie, of course, treated it like the greatest defensive play since the Patriots’ Malcolm Butler had picked off Russell Wilson to end that famous Patriots-Seahawks Super Bowl.

  “I don’t know if you guys are ready for tomorrow,” Cassie said to Teddy and Gus as they walked back to the house. “But clearly, I am.”

  When his friends had gone home, Teddy went upstairs, got on his bed, and got out his playbook. Once more he was amazed at how thick it had gotten, how many plays his dad had added across the season.

  He was looking at a couple of the last pass plays he’d added, one to Gus and one to Nate, when his mom came into his room and sat down at the end of his bed.

  “I just want to tell you one thing before I turn in,” she said.

  “Please don’t try to tell me that it doesn’t really matter whether we win or lose tomorrow.”

  “Nope,” she said, “not this football mom. No, sir.”

  She smiled. “I just wanted to tell you, once and for all, how proud I am of you, for the way you’ve handled everything this season, on and off the field. And what a great kid I think you are.”

  He smiled back at her, closing his playbook as he did. “Thanks, Mom.”

  “They wouldn’t have made it to tomorrow with you,” she said as she stood up. “I know enough about sports to know that.”

  He wasn’t going to argue the point with her. In his heart, what he believed now was a great football heart, he believed she was right. He put down his playbook and walked over to her. He put his arms around her, and his head on her shoulder, the way he had when he was a lot smaller than he was now.

  “I wouldn’t have made it without
you,” he said.

  They stood there for a long time, just the two of them, the way it had almost always been.

  THIRTY-SIX

  By ten thirty in the morning, two and a half hours before the championship game, Teddy couldn’t wait any longer. He called Gus and told him to meet him at Holzman now.

  “Jack’s with me,” Gus said. “On our way.”

  Teddy got into his uniform. He’d eaten a big breakfast at nine because his mom made him, even though he’d told her he wasn’t that hungry. “You’re not beating Norris on an empty stomach,” she said. “Well, check that. You could. But I’d rather not risk it.”

  He took his ball with him when he got into the car. Even on the morning of the big game, you never wanted to show up at the field and not have a ball to throw around.

  He got to Holzman first and saw that they’d put fresh chalk on all the lines. Somehow the town groundskeepers had made the grass look as good as new, as if they were starting the season all over again. They’d even written WILDCATS and PANTHERS in the end zones.

  When Jack and Gus arrived, Teddy saw that Jack was wearing his number 12 jersey for the first time since he’d gotten hurt.

  “You look good in that thing,” Teddy said, “even without pads.”

  “I’d rather be in pads,” Jack said, “and playing.”

  “I want to play right now,” Gus said.

  Teddy and Gus did their stretching. The three of them soft-tossed for a few minutes. When Teddy was ready to start throwing for real, Jack and Gus were his receivers. Teddy couldn’t believe how good the ball felt in his hand, better than it ever had. Gus wasn’t the only one who wanted to play right this minute.

  Time seemed to go way too slow until noon, when it began to speed up the way it always did in the last hour before a game. The Norris team bus showed up, Scotty Hanley, their quarterback, leading them off it. There was another bus right behind it for Norris parents and family members.

  The stands on both sides of the field began to fill up. Teddy heard them testing the public address system they’d be using at Holzman for the first time all season. Max Conte’s dad, seated at a table under the scoreboard, was going to be the announcer. There was even a microphone stand set up in front of the Wildcats’ bench; Katie Cummings would use it to sing the national anthem.