The Underdogs (24 page)

It wouldn't be official until his doctor looked at the X-ray an hour later. But he'd broken a bone in his right ankle.

Just like that, they were ten.

A
t Monday night's practice, Joe Tyler wouldn't allow any of his players to start feeling sorry for themselves.

“The only one we feel bad for here is Chris,” he said to the team. “He's the one who lost his season here. And believe me, I know what that's like. You know that line people use, about feeling somebody's pain? Well, in this case, I can feel his.”

The players were kneeling along the forty-yard line closest to Arch Street. Toby's dad was standing behind Will's dad, holding an old-fashioned black-and-white school notebook in his hand. When Will had asked him what was inside the notebook, Mr. Keenan had said, “Blitzes, for the first ten-man defense in history. Because defense still wins.”

But for now he listened to Joe Tyler along with the rest of them.

“Chris lost his season, but we didn't lose ours,” Will's dad said. “We've got one more game left to play. You know what old guys like Dick and I would give to have one more game like this? Anything.”

He turned and said, “Am I right?”

Dick Keenan said, “I ran into Coach Carson, who used to coach Joe and me, the other day. The old man is retiring at the end of the year. He asked me how I liked coaching. Wanted to know if it was anywhere near as good as playing. Good thing I'm not still playing for him, because I said, ‘Coach, all due respect, but you must be losin' your mind.
Nothing
is better than playing.'”

“Coach Keenan is right,” Will's dad said. “There's nothing better than playing a game like this, against who we're playing it. On our field, in front of our fans. So the Bulldogs are underdogs again. So big deal. Been there, done that. It's like Will says: Wouldn't want it any other way.”

It sounded like he was finished. They all started to get to their feet. But there was one more thing he wanted to tell them.

“We're not winning this game for Chris on Saturday. We're winning it for
us.
And for every other team that ever got told it wasn't good enough. All the other teams who had that chip on their shoulders that we got.”

He put his hand out. “Now bring it in,” he said.

They did. Put their hands on top of his. Then it was just left to Will to put an exclamation point to the longest speech he'd ever heard from his dad.

“Bulldogs,” Will said.

The rest of the Bulldogs shouted it back at him, louder than they ever had before.

 

Before Dick Keenan could show off his ten-man defense, all the fancy blitzes he
had
come up with for them and for Castle Rock, there was a much bigger job, especially on the Monday night before the championship game:

They had to officially name a quarterback to replace Chris Aiello.

They had started out losing last year's quarterback and now they had lost this year's quarterback. On Sunday, Will and his dad had gone over every possible replacement for Chris, including Will.

They had finally come up with what they thought were their two best candidates: Jeremiah Keating and Johnny Callahan. Jeremiah had been the backup quarterback on the sixth-grade team last year. Johnny had never played quarterback in his life but had shown off a pretty decent arm as his Little League team's best pitcher.

Problem was, they both looked like scrubs at practice tonight.

Whatever Jeremiah had once known about the basics—taking the snap from center, pivoting smoothly and handing the ball off—he had totally forgotten. Gone. Without any defensive pressure, any pressure of any kind, he was messing up the transfer of the ball to Will about half the time. And the harder he tried to get it right, the worse things got for him. It turned out he could throw just fine, but the Bulldogs weren't a throwing team first, they were a running team.

Johnny was a little better getting the ball into Will's belly, but not much. And
his
throwing when he dropped back in the pocket was pretty much a horror. Will thought he was the one more likely to get better with time.

They just didn't
have
time.

Playing without a quarterback was as bad as playing
with
ten.

At one point, while everybody else was taking a quick water break, Will stayed on the field with his dad and Mr. Keenan.

Joe Tyler said, “We could alternate them. Jeremiah throws it better, and Johnny can at least execute a simple handoff.”

“Yeah,” Dick Keenan said. “And the Castle Rock coaches will barely notice that we got one guy in there to hand it off and the other guy in to throw.”

They decided to go with Johnny, who promised everybody his throwing would get better in the three more practices they had between now and Saturday.

“Look at it this way, Coach,” Johnny said. “No way my throwing can get any worse in that time.”

They worked on defense for the rest of practice, trying to learn the blitzes Mr. Keenan had in that notebook of his, ones that he said were designed to keep Ben Clark guessing before every single snap.

“They're gonna know they're on the power play,” Mr. Keenan said at one point. “But we're gonna make 'em wonder why it don't feel like one.”

Another time he said, “The whole point of this is to have enough moving parts that they don't get to exploit the fact that we happen to have a part missing.”

“And a few screws loose,” Joe Tyler said.

“That too,” Dick Keenan said. Will thought for a second he might even get crazy on them and smile.

But he kept himself under control.

At the very end of practice, darkness coming fast now, Will's dad had them work on punting, worried that being short one blocker might get a punt blocked on Hannah in a big moment on Saturday.

So he moved a couple of guys around, put three up-backs in the backfield to block for her instead of the usual two, told the outside guys it was their job to protect the wings and give her time.

They practiced by having Wes long-snap the ball to Hannah with just three guys in front of her and everybody else—including Joe Tyler and Dick Keenan—coming at her on an all-out blitz.

They didn't block one on her. On her last kick of the night, she totally showed off, saying she was going to try to kick one out-of-bounds but just bombing one out of the back of the end zone instead, as if she wanted to remind everybody of the leg that got her on the team in the first place.

Then she was telling her teammates that she kicked that ball the way they were going to kick Kendrick and his friends all over the field on Saturday, and then the practice that had started with them thinking about the loss of their quarterback had turned into all this trash talk and laughter.

Will took off his helmet, broke off from the rest of the Bull-dogs, started jogging toward the sideline.

That was when he got hit for the second time this season by a flying football that came at him out of nowhere.

This time he went down.

“What the . . . ?” he said, his head ringing, jumping up to see where the ball had come from.

It had come from Toby.

Will remembered him running off to retrieve the ball Hannah had just punted out of sight. Now he was standing in the distance, between the goalposts.

More than fifty yards away.

“I am
so
sorry!” he yelled to Will.

Running hard toward Will now, trying to explain as he did, saying, “Are you okay? I was just throwing it up there for fun, and then you ran right into it, and you didn't hear me when I yelled for you to look out.”

All of a sudden, Will's head didn't hurt nearly as much as it had a few seconds ago.

“Did you say you
threw
it?”

“Yeah.”

“From the back of the
end
zone?”

Toby seemed to realize they were all staring at him now, along with the coaches.

Joe Tyler said, “How come you never told me you could throw a football like that?”

Toby shrugged.

“You never asked me,” he said.

I
t had been an amazing day, Will thought when he was back in his room.

Like the season had been amazing from the start.

From the time he'd fumbled in last year's championship game, turning one of the best days of his life into one of the worst, he'd dreamed about the day when he'd play the Castle Rock Bears again with the whole season on the line.

Now that game was less than a week away.

But if somebody had told him how he'd get here, how they'd all get here—how his dad would get here and Toby's dad and even Hannah Grayson—Will Tyler would have thought somebody had made the whole thing up.

And on top of that, if somebody had also told Will they were going to try to beat the big, bad Bears of Castle Rock with just ten players, he would have had to borrow one of Tim's favorite words:

He would have thought they were
buggin'.

But here they were.

A girl had joined the team and then Toby had, too. Tim had left. Chris had broken his ankle at the worst-possible time, not that there was ever a particularly special time for something like that to happen.

Will and his dad had done this together. Somehow Toby and
his
dad had done the same thing. Only now they had to find a way to finish the job, against the best and deepest team in the league.

But how?

Will sat on the windowsill for a while, staring out at Valley Road. No answers for him out there. No answer when he looked up at the stars in the sky. No answer when he stretched out on his bed and stared at the ceiling.

No way to make the sides even between now and Saturday.

He thought:
We need an eleventh man.

The Bulldogs were so close to pushing the ball across the line, they just needed a little push, like the one Matt Leinart gave Reggie Bush in a famous USC–Notre Dame game that Will loved to watch on ESPN Classic.

One more time, Will knew he had to try something.

But what?

One more desperation heave, that's what.

One more Hail Mary.

He got up off the bed and opened his laptop and sent Hannah a Facebook message.

A few minutes later she sent back a message of her own.

 

 

 

 

Then Will was all the way back to the beginning, to where this had all started for him and the Bulldogs and his dad and everybody else:

He wrote one more letter.

T
he last practice before the championship game was Thursday night at Shea.

It was Toby's last chance to complete his crash course in being a quarterback, one more chance for all of them to become familiar with Mr. Keenan's crazy defenses.

But that wasn't what they were all talking about once they were together on the field. What they were all talking about was the latest edition of the Forbes
Dispatch,
which came out on Thursday afternoons.

They were talking about the story Hannah's dad had splashed across the front page.

One written “by Will Tyler.”

Will had seen it as soon as he came home from school and had called Hannah right away.

“It was only supposed to be a letter to the editor,” he said.

“And that's exactly what I told my dad,” she had said. “But he thought it ought to be more.” She giggled. “Besides, you know you can't trust the press.”

The headline on the front page read:

Then came Will's byline, and underneath that, the letter—what he
thought
was a letter—he had written on Monday night. Since Hannah's dad was the editor, Will had begun by writing

“Dear Mr. Grayson.”