and Leigh, 'This is Rodgers and Hammerstein, not rock and ro-ool,' and trotted toward the building.
I walked toward the dressing rooms - Coach had popped back inside - and Arnie and Leigh started across to the bleachers. Halfway to the doors I stopped and went back to Christine. Late to suit up or not, I approached her in a circle; that absurd prejudice against walking in front of the car still held.
On the rear end I saw a Pennsylvania dealer plate held on with a spring. I flipped it down and saw a Dymo tape stuck to the back side: THIS PLATE PROPERTY OF DARNELL'S GARAGE, LIBERTYVILLE, PA.
I let the plate snap back and stood up, frowning. Darnell had given him a sticker while his car was still a ways from being street-legal; Darnell had loaned him a dealer plate so he could use the car to bring Leigh to the game. Also, he had stopped being 'Darnell' to Arnie; today he had called him 'Will'. Interesting, but not very comforting.
I wondered if Arnie was dumb enough to think that the Will Darnells of this world ever did favours out of the goodness of their hearts. I hoped he wasn't, but I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure of much about Arnie anymore. He had changed a lot in the last few weeks.
We surprised the hell out of ourselves and won the game - as it turned out, that was one of only two we won that whole season . . . not that I was with the team when the season ended.
We had no right to win; we went out on the field feeling like losers, and we lost the toss. The Hillmen (dumb name for a team, but what's so bright about being known as the Terriers when you get right down to it?) went forty yards on their first two plays, going through our defensive line like cheese through a goose. Then, on the third play - their third first-and-ten in a row - their quarterback coughed up the ball. Gary Tardiff grabbed it up and rambled sixty yards for the score, a great big grin on his face.
The Hillmen and their coach went bananas protesting that the ball had been dead at the line of scrimmage, but the officials disagreed and we led 6-0. From my place on the bench I was able to look across at the visitors' bleachers and could see that the few Libertyville fans there were going crazy. I guess they had a right to; it was the first time we'd led in a game all season. Arnie and Leigh were waving Terriers pennants. I waved at them. Leigh saw me, waved back, then elbowed Arnie. He waved back too. They looked as if they were getting pretty chummy up there, which made me grin.
As for the game, we never looked back after that first flukey score. We had that mystic thing, momentum, on our side - maybe for the only time that year. I didn't break the Conference touchdown record as Arnie had predicted, but I scored three times, one of them on a ninety-yard runback, the longest I ever made. At halftime it was 17-0, and Coach was a new man. He saw a complete turnaround ahead of us, the greatest comeback in the history of the Conference. Of course that turned out to be a fool's dream, but he surely was excited that day, and I felt good for him, as I had for Arnie and Leigh, getting to know each other so profitably and easily.
The second half was not so good; our defence resumed the mostly prone posture it had assumed in our first three games, but it was still never really close. We won 27-18.
Coach had taken me out halfway through the fourth quarter to put in Brian McNally, who would be replacing me next year - actually even earlier than that, as it turned out. I showered and changed up, then came back out just as the two-minute warning went off.
The parking lot was full of cars but empty of people. Wild cheering came from the field as the Hillmen fans urged their team to do the impossible in the last two minutes of play. From this distance it all seemed as unimportant as it undoubtedly was'
I walked over toward Christine.
There she sat with her rust-flecked sides and her new bonnet and her tailfins that seemed a thousand miles along. A dinosaur from the dark ditty-bop