It’s been a tough season: our team has one win and who knows how many losses. Each Saturday, we head out, and I tell the Boy to do his best, to enjoy the game, to keep his chin up no matter the outcome, to tell him that they can indeed win because they have done it before — and I convince myself of it. And then three, five, seven minutes into the game, the other team scores its first goal, and I immediately turn pessimistic.

Today was no different. Within the first half of the first half, we were down 0-3. We stopped the hemorrhaging and even scored a goal to enter the half-time break down 1-3.

Then I hear from the couple sitting beside me, “Oh no. No. Dear God, no.” I look up and see that their son is putting on the goalie jersey. This is their son’s first year playing, and like many kids, he’s not particularly athletic. But he wants to play, and he does the best he can. His parents cheer him on continually, and the other boys on the team are supportive as well. “I love my son,” the other said, “but he doesn’t throw himself in front of anything.” Yet the boys hold it together fairly well, letting two more goals in while scoring two more themselves to end 3-5.

After our third goal, one of the parents from the other team became irate. “Call the illegal throw!” he screamed. I didn’t see that our boys had done anything illegal, but he apparently thought they had. I glanced over to see a fairly muscular tattooed man with bulging veins in his neck as he yelled “Call the illegal throw!” again.

What a jerk, I thought. What a way to set an excellent example: yell at the ref who is himself a high-school-aged kid. How embarrassing.

Eventually, he calmed down, but he continued making remarks about the ref and how our boys weren’t following the rules.

I wanted to walk over to him and say, “Look, man, it’s a game. They’re kids; the ref is a kid; your kid’s team is up by 2 — calm yourself and stop making an ass of yourself.” Of course, that would have made me just as bad as he in many ways, and nothing good could come of a confrontation like that.

It turns out, though, that this was the opponents’ first win of the season. That makes us tied as far as records go…