Matching Tracksuits

When I was in high school, Friday night football was, during the beginning of the year, the highlight of the week. Everyone would arrive early to stake out their seats and make sure all the lowly freshmen got the worst seats. Friends saved seats for each other, and had cell phones existed then, they likely would have been texting each other, asking where they were, demanding that they hurry.

All the students went to cheer on the team, to hang out, to escape parents, to escape the everyday. The cheerleaders led everyone with raucous, taunting chants, and the marching band took the spotlight during halftime. The football players looked, and probably felt, a bit like stars.

My next-door neighbor played on the football team, and though we were not close, I’d wish him luck with the game if I saw him that day. The neighbor across the street also played, but even though I was closer to him than my next-door neighbor during our childhood, by the time we reached high school, we rarely talked.

Win or lose, spirits were always high. While everyone wanted the home team to win, it wasn’t just about the game’s outcome. It was about the friendship and closeness that everyone experienced.

At least I’m assuming it was, for I never went to a Friday night high school football game as a kid. Not once. It was in part because of a lack of desire, I suppose: football was never really something I loved except for a short couple of years when I was in second and third grade. (Or was it first and second grade? Or third and fourth grade? Hard to remember.) The main reason I never went was because it was off limits: growing up in a sabbatarian sect, we observed Friday night sundown to Saturday night sundown as the Sabbath, and all worldly cares and events went by the wayside. A Friday night football game was most certainly out of the question.

I never really wanted to go, but I wouldn’t have been able to even if I did want it.

Or I tell myself that. Could my inability to go, my knowledge long before I could develop a desire to go that I would never be allowed to go, my certainty that there was something deeply and spiritually wrong with going to watch a football game on Friday night — could that have tempered my desire before it ever developed?

I tell myself that I would not have felt comfortable there even if I did go because most of that crowd — the in-crowd, the popular crowd — felt uncomfortable. But why? If I’m honest it’s because I was always distancing myself to begin with: I knew I could never really do any of the things they did on the weekend even if I was invited, even if they begged me because they thought I was the most amazing person to be around, even if I were king of homecoming (which I could have never been because, well, it’s probably obvious). I’d never been terribly close to any of them outside of school (and perhaps playing in the neighborhood after school) during elementary school, and that moved with me into junior high where it settled into a sort of permanent quasi-outsider sense that I carried with me into college.

So at tonight’s high football game — the first I, at nearly fifty years old, had ever been to in my life — I found myself wondering how different my light might have been if I had not grown up in what can only charitably be called a sect. I’m not bitter about my childhood; I don’t regret that life; I appreciate what I got in return for Friday night and Saturday events.

But I still can’t help but wonder…