Field of Steve

“And Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and the LORD caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided.”

Everyone with a blog gets a chance to riff on how afraid we’ve all become in society. We force our kids to wear helmets when they’re riding their bikes, we don’t let them walk to their friends’ houses by themselves, we keep hand sanitizer in the car, we overcook our hamburgers and spray disinfectant when someone says the word “sneeze.” I’m guilty of most of those and probably all of them at some time or another. And I’m not introducing an idea that’s original. The rants have become so tired and worn that I’ve become accustomed to rolling my eyes when someone starts, yet here I go.

The other day as I was leaving the YMCA where I work out, having thoroughly wiped down the elliptical machine I used, I heard a conversation that launched me into this little snit. I was walking by the basketball courts and greeted someone I know and like a lot. A good guy. As I opened the door to leave I heard him say to someone else, “I’m not picking it up.”

As I approached the exit the other guy came through the gym door and said to the woman at the front desk, “Ma’am, there’s a Band-Aid on the floor.”

I didn’t stay to see how it played out, but my assumption is that the guy wanted the staff to take care of it. Put on the rubber gloves and discard that thing in the medical waste bin, which I wouldn’t be surprised to learn the Y has.

Am I out of touch? I would have picked the thing up or ignored it, not thinking much more about it. But is it our fear that a Band-Aid, which over my lifetime went from being proof of some childhood heroism to an annoyance I put up with to stop the mess, is a carrier of something fatal? Someone had an owie. They put a bandage on it and it fell off and now we have to call the HazMat team to clear the site.

This little tirade probably qualifies me as old, but I am willing to take that risk. In a game of basketball there’s far more risk of getting something nasty from the sweaty guy you fouled than there is from a discarded Band-Aid. And let’s not start talking about the diseases floating in the swimming pool.

Life is messy. Over the time that you will live I’m willing to guess that you will swim in water that’s been peed in, eat a burger that’s been spat on and a strawberry that wasn’t thoroughly washed, you’ll kiss someone who’s sick and pass on sicknesses yourself.

Besides, do you know where that basketball has been?

The 1980s were golden years for L.A. sports fans, especially because most of the world still cared about the NBA. Recap: The Raiders won one championship in Los Angeles, the Dodgers won two and the Lakers won five, two of them against the Boston Celtics (pronounced sell-ticks).

A few things have happened since then that have made me less in tune with the goings on in Los Angeles. One, I couldn’t claim to live there since 1986. Two, not only do I not live there, I now live in a place that makes getting there more than a 10-hour drive. Three, I really love where I do live.

That said, I still maintain my allegiance to the Dodgers. The Lakers, not so much. During the 1990s they became a team of thugs and crybabies and I was living in Utah. I started rooting for the Utah Jazz, because I wanted to see Jerry Sloan, Karl Malone and John Stockton get a championship. They were already Dream Teamers, but wore no NBA rings. The Lakers, young and cocky, were roadblocks on the way. The Jazz blew their shot. The Lakers got better at a time when the NBA was full of personalities I couldn’t stand. We lived near Portland for a couple of years at a time when the Blazers were known as the Jailblazers. So L.A. won a few championships at a time when I wasn’t watching the NBA much.

To make matters worse, we moved near Seattle and during Nate McMillan’s last year here as a coach I grew to have an affection for the Seattle Supersonics. Then the team let Nate go to Portland and the new owners made a sham show of trying to stay here, when everyone except David Stern knew the intention all along was to move the team to Oklahoma City.

Seriously. Oklahoma City. I’m not kidding about that.

David Stern, the NBA’s jefe, has been a complicit worm in the entire deal. Now we’ve got court cases in which the former owner is trying to void the sale. He may have a case, because the new Sonics owners were stupid enough to send congratulatory e-mails to each other when things got bad for Seattle basketball fans. So a city with a 40-year history with the league is struggling, causing some a-holes from Oklahoma to celebrate and David Stern is on their side? Yeah, that’s my story. So why should I care at all about the NBA?

Well, here’s why. One of Seattle’s good guys, Ray Allen, got traded to Boston, where he joined two other superstars and suddenly the Celtics were good again. Not only were they good, they’re great, the best in the NBA. I’ve been rooting for them all year. As much as deep in my heart I’d still like to see the Los Angeles Lakers with as many banners as the Celtics, I have a real appreciation for Allen, who wanted to make it work here in Seattle. So I paid some attention to how he and the Celtics were doing, not at all aware that the Lakers were winning. Now we’re a few games from a Lakers-Celtics finals and it has caught me completely by surprise. Actually, the money now would be on a Lakers-Pistons finals, but if the Celtics win one on the road that goes back to the former possibility.

When the reality-struck that it could be L.A.-Boston, I suddenly realized that I didn’t know who I’d root for. More alarmingly, I realized that I actually cared. I hate the NBA, but it matters to me which team is the best in a league I despise. If the Lakers were only Kobe Bryant, the choice would be easy. But he has changed as a player, which partly explains why the team is two games away from the finals. Plus, they’ve got some good guys on that team. So maybe I never did lose my love for the Lakers. I guess I’m conditional. I was glad for Shaq when they won those earlier championships, because I thought he had matured as a player. Overall, if the guys on the team are decent guys, my default team might still be the Lakers. Then again, I like the Celtics. And if the Sonics were any good and still in Seattle, well then maybe they’d be my team.

The immediate reality here, though, is if it’s a Lakers-Celtics finals, I’m certainly going to watch. That’s good news for ABC. If it’s Lakers-Pistons, then I’ll probably watch. If it’s Celtics-Spurs, then I might watch. If it’s Pistons-Spurs I won’t watch. I won’t care. That I would care under any circumstances is news to me.

While I think Hillary Clinton was until last night largely justified in staying in the race, I agree with George Will’s characterization of some of Hillary Clinton’s ongoing justification for staying in the race.

“We,” says Geoff Garin, a Clinton strategist who possesses the audacity of hopelessness required in that role, “don’t think this is just going to be about some numerical metric.” Mere numbers? Heaven forefend. That is how people speak when numerical metrics — numbers of popular votes and delegates — are inconvenient.

It’s over. As a local Democrat here said:

“The only thing they could hope for was that he would self-destruct,” (Dave) Peterson said, “and he just hasn’t done so.”

On Tuesday we thought it would be a good idea to talk to some Democrats and ask them their thoughts about the possibility that the Democratic campaign could stretch into June and even August. We stopped people on the street and got some comments. I finished the story Tuesday evening, but as the night wore on it was clear it wasn’t going to end the way we’d speculated everything. So I had to retool the story and the video, which you can see here.

You’ve likely noticed the theme change, which wonderfully provides you dead links.

I’m working on it.

I’m also trying to figure out how to change the header picture to something more appropriate, like a picture of someone never sleeping.

Maybe not that.

I’ve got stuff to say, but I’ll save it for another day.

Saturday Bruce Springsteen brought the band to Seattle and thanks to the availability of one final VIP ticket I got to go. I made a request to go as a media person and got seats next to a group of eight who got their tickets through his manager, John Landau.

I can’t say I was as amped as I’ve been in years past leading up to the concert. About three notes into the first song, “Trapped,” though I was into it for good. I wrote about it in for my paper in a political context, which didn’t impress a couple of folks who were sorry to log into my story.

A month ago Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain came to Seattle prior to the Feb. 9 caucuses. I’m told Ron Paul was here, too, but no one tipped me off. I went to the Clinton, Obama and McCain events and wrote about them for the Kitsap Sun. For the McCain visit I was invited to be part of a rolling press conference between Boeing (Isn’t that appropriate.) Field and the Westin Hotel downtown. There about 10 reporters present. I shot video of part of it and at the campaign stop. Our Web Editor edited it.

Andrew Binion, one of my co-workers, wrote one of the best, funniest columns I’ve read about this political season. He says if we want to really know what we need to about the candidates, we need to make them mad.

We need to enrage the presidential candidates.

I don’t mean cast our ballots or caucus votes for third parties. I mean personally offend the candidates. Make them angry at you. Tell them that you have the same shoes at home and paid half what they paid. Ask them if they’ve seen an obscure 1970s science fiction movie, then look down your nose when they answer they never heard of it.

Obviously I’m not keeping this thing so active that I expect people to come back regularly. If this was part of your regular tour on the Web, sorry for the absence. The computer crashed. Life was busy, etc.

At work I will have a bit of a job shift to better match the politics I want to cover. I’ll be handing Bremerton over to the guy next to me and I’ll cover the county, which is largely a political body. It’s a good thing.

Illahee Road near our house. This means our son’s bus ride to school has gone from 10 minutes to a half-hour. Kitsap Sun photo by Larry Steagall.

On Wednesday we returned from a week’s vacation in sunny (mostly) Southern California to this.

While in San Diego at Legoland, my brother-in-law sent a picture to my cell phone of a car submerged in water. It was in Silverdale, and the water flow is the worst there when it rains heavily, so I thought perhaps we had a storm that was a little wetter than usual. Then I talked to him and it took me a while, but I eventually understood that the storm this region was getting was significantly bigger than normal. I made some calls to folks from church to make sure they were OK and to see if someone could come sweep some debris out of a couple of storm drains at our house, but one guy I talked to said he didn’t think he could make it. He lives about a 10-minute walk away, but it sounded to him like the road was out.

The picture here is what had happened.

Our house was fine. The water got a few inches deep in the driveway, but none went inside. We didn’t take the laptop with us on our trip, so I wasn’t checking my paper’s Web site for updates. We relied on phone calls and watched Nightline, surprised that rain in the Pacific Northwest merited a segment on the show.

It wasn’t until we got home that I really understood the strength of the storm. The road outage you see here means my son’s bus ride to school has gone from about 10 minutes to about 30 minutes. Not only was this road completely destroyed here, two others that beat a path to the school were partially damaged, enough to close them for a few months.

In short, this was a big deal.

On Friday before the storm we were at Disney’s California Adventure Park, the new amusement park next to the main park. It rained on us hard that day. We found out Disney stores could run out of ponchos. Across the way another store had them. My daughter and I went on the rides while my wife and sons went after less rapid amusements. It’s pouring rain on us and we decide to go on this river rapid ride. Because everything is so wet, there’s no waiting in what is the slow season anyway. We get around one time only partially soaked (thanks again to the ponchos) and we get asked if we want to go again. I say, “no,” but Sarah wants another round. It was a fun ride, so I agreed. We got a little wetter.

We then head to a couple more rides and get on the California Screamin’ roller coaster, which is probably the best roller coaster I’ve ever ridden. (I don’t get out much.) Again, the rain is so constant that there’s no waiting for any rides. We get off the first time and walk around to get on again. After that I tell Sarah, “I think I’ve got one more in me,” and we get in line again, holding out for the front seat. (That meant waiting behind one set of people.) The last ride was great again, but as the cars begin coasting into the end point, my stomach tells me the last ride may have been one too many. I manage to get off the ride but linger back a bit to let everyone else get ahead. When everyone’s out of sight I lean over a railing in case I need to deposit my breakfast. I’m grateful I didn’t, though I came close.

We went on one more ride before deciding we’d had enough after only three hours. My wife and sons were ready to go, too. (Heck, our youngest is nine months old and will basically do whatever we tell him.)

We were cold and wet, which at Disneyland counts as suffering.

Nothing like coming home, however, to bring on the dreaded disease — perspective.

When Mom died she and I my father had been together about 50 years. I’m not sure how much either one had thought about what life would be like without the other. I am pretty certain neither would have minded the other dating. I’m also pretty sure that neither would have relished the other having to experience the ugliness of dating, or the potential for it.

Dad didn’t seem to be that interested in “dating” per se, but liked the idea of having someone to hang out with. Probably for a while after Mom died he thought about a potential second wife, but I don’t recall it ever being that serious.

A few months ago Dad told us he had joined an online dating service. “Good for him,” I thought. Perhaps there would be someone who could be a buddy of sorts. Dad’s health has declined and he has a hard time getting around. He’s also always struggled with weight, so it’s not like he’s Sean Connery. Nevertheless, he’s a good man. He’s the best, I’ll tell you. So I was a little protective when he began a particular friendship with a woman on the other end of the Internet. They chatted for a while. Neither seemed interested in anything serious. That was good, I thought. They talked about meeting up some day and that day continued to be delayed.

After a few weeks they finally managed to get together. She came to the house. They talked, had a good time, it seemed. As she left she gave him a kiss. Whenever someone has to travel any distance, Dad always wants a call to make sure the trip was safe. Hours passed and she didn’t call. He called her and got voice mail. He may have called again.

On the dating service he joined, it is possible to not accept messages from individuals, with several reasons a user can choose for doing so. Within a couple days after my dad’s date with the woman, she had decided to not accept messages from Dad, choosing the option “other.”

Bear in mind again my father spent 50 years of his life with the same woman. He raised three boys and served his community as a police officer. The online woman he met has been through a couple marriages. He’s been a model of stability and basic goodness. He deserved better than “other.” His experience reminded me so much of my experience of dating in Utah. Things might seem to be going well, but then it all disintegrates and you’re the last to know. If you ever get an honest answer why you’re lucky. I never thought my father would ever have to experience that kind of gracelessness again. Neither did he. Nor is he willing to again. He quit his membership in the dating service. “Good for him,” I say.

The Los Angeles Times is fortunate to have a photographer who either writes very well, or writes well enough to be well edited.

In Iraq he took the photo of the man who has become known as the Marlboro Marine, aka James Blake Miller. When Miller made it home, however, his life was less than what we’d hope for a hero.

Luis Sinco, the photographer, took on an unusual role for a journalist, because in many ways he felt responsible for launching Miller into the world of being famous.

“I have to ask you something, Blake,” I said. “If I’d gone down in Fallouja, would you have carried me out?”

“Damn straight,” he said, without hesitation.

“OK then,” I said. “I think you’re wounded pretty badly. I want to help you.”

He looked at me for a moment. “All right,” he said.

Such a role is unusual, because most people whose stories we tell already have stong support, or at least some around them. A couple whose son died of a heroin overdose had each other. A boy whose injury left him mostly paralyzed had his family. A couple dealing with her cancer had each other, and when she died he had an entire community to buoy him.

Somehow in the case of Sinto and Walker, they bonded because the photographer survived the same nightmare as the soldier. For most of us, we can sympathize, but not empathize. In fact, we often avoid telling stories that are too close to our own.

In a war, that’s often impossible.

For the past several years we’ve watched around the country as newspapers one-by-one have offered early retirements and laid off countless numbers of employees. It’s a reality certain members in the blog community love and celebrate. Some of the exultation is because many bloggers and their clickers believe we’re the PR arm of the Democratic Party. Others like it because they don’t like how self-congratulatory we can be. I don’t think we’re the most self-important body out there, but we do believe ourselves pretty important to democracy, and rightly so.

Despite all that, I believe we traditional journalists will see the trends turn around. For one, most bloggers give it up before long. We had a fairly decent online site in our neighborhood that broke a story or two, but eventually couldn’t sustain itself. I run another blog for my job and am the chief writer for another one there.

I get paid to do it.

Besides the bloggers who drop off because they realize that writing regularly actually does take work, there are others who are rejecting the notion that they should write for free. Take, for example, this entry from a guy who spent years as a reporter and now has a blog dealing with mental health issues. He got an offer to blog on a site that would offer him more exposure, but pay him nothing. He began his response:

Thank you for your email and interest in my work. It’s been a long-standing dream of mine to write for free. I have 13 years as a paid professional print journalist who specializes in investigative reporting and has won two dozen or so awards for my work. I have graduate degrees from UC-Berkeley and the University of Utah and studied for a semester at Cambridge University as well. My work has been published in national, regional and local newspapers and magazines.

It gets even more snarky, and potty-mouthed, but his basic point is something I’m 100 percent on board with.

Part of my argument then was that no one will do for free the kind of journalism the Web 2.0 crowd thinks it’s creating. Journalism costs money. If you’re talking investigative reporting, it’ll cost more especially if there are loads of public records and lawyers at the party. If you just want to slap content around that sort of sounds like it’s floating around the truth in the half-informed commentary that the blogosphere is heir to–instead of being able to legitimately offer said truth–then I guess you can get it for free. But I’m not blogging for free for someone else. I can do that for myself quite nicely.

Right on.

I blog here for free for a couple reasons. One, I like it. Two, I hope that one day it will pay, or at least be a marketing arm for other projects I do that do pay. I write now because I want something already established in place when lots of visitors do start coming. For now I’m content with Chad and Brant as the regular commenters and the lurkers from Stockton, Pocatello, Hillsboro and sometimes the Middle East.

I need to get this out of the way because I know it’s on Brant’s mind and frankly it’s on mine right now. As soon as I say the name, though, you pretty much have to know how my review is going to come out, because I’m absolutely incapable of being even-handed, impartial or objective about the topic.

Bruce Springsteen has a new disc out.

My review? You seriously need to ask?

Like most of my experiences with Springsteen records, I liked it fine at first, but after a few listens I’m just pretty much hooked. I’m at a stage right now in which I believe this is just about one of his best works ever. Also, as is true with some of Bruce’s other albums, it’s taking me a while to get some of the stories. That’s always worth it, because while Bruce is regarded as a rocker, for me his strength has always been the storytelling accompanied by an appropriate soundtrack.

I may have more on this in the future.

WordPress, assuming my short search for answers is correct, makes it incredibly difficult to put up a simple E-mail link on this board. I’m sure all two or three of you who read this blog have, at times, wanted to write to me personally without everyone else seeing it. Whether it’s to gush over the stirring content that I so unselfishly provide, or to wrongfully criticize me for your shortcomings, sometimes it’s just between you and me.

I understand.

So I waltzed around the limitations of this blog program and found a way for you to address me personally. I may rue the day I get more spam, but for now I’m willing to let you address me privately.

On the right of the screen you can see a new category that reads “E-mail” me. As the message orders, don’t click on it. That will be an exercise in frustration. Instead, just copy the steven@fieldofsteve.com address and send me your ramblings. I might read it. Heck, I might even care.

Twenty years ago or so I thought more about my old high school classmates and knew less about them than I do now. On Sunday I wrote an e-mail to a guy I kind of hung out with from time to time when I was a teenager. Had I not come across some information about him on the Internet, I’d have never considered it.

Twenty years ago had I been living in Washington it would have been a lot of work to find out about some of the congressional races in another state. Yesterday, however, remembering a name connected to a name in my past, I found out a former girlfriend’s husband is running for Congress. Not only that, some think he’s got a decent shot of unseating the Democratic incumbent. I don’t know him at all, but the woman he married was for a time one of my best friends.

I introduced her here as a former girlfriend, but in truth she was far more friend than girlfriend. We worked together at the college paper. Then a group of us went on D.C. internships at the same time. My roommate and sometimes friend had the hots for her. I tried to pretend I didn’t and told him to go ahead. I said that after I had tried to discourage him from it a few times. Finally I said “go ahead,” because I knew that’s what he wanted to hear, and at the time I didn’t think I was interested. Unfortunately, he only heard the encouragement without any of the nuance. Once we all got out to D.C. she and I talked and it was clear we felt more for each other than we’d let on. We decided to carry on in secret, but got busted holding hands in the TV room at the apartment complex we were living in. He didn’t take it well and I’m not sure I can blame him.

As for the romance, I would go in and out of interest in her, until a point where she’d given up on me, right when I decided I didn’t want to lose her. I spent much of the rest of the semester pursuing her. Things were hot and cold and I was my normal co-dependent self. While things were hot my roommate, Roger, pretended I didn’t exist. When things were cold he was as warm as any friend I’d ever had. The semester at the internship workplace was perfect. My life outside of there was awful. It came to a head St. Patrick’s Day weekend, when four of us went up to New York City.

It was three guys and her. She was the only one I could talk to. Roger wouldn’t acknowledge me at all and the other guy, Tom, was in an awkward situation. My sole comfort that weekend were the times I was alone with her. I’m pretty sure I remember talking to her about marriage while we walked around the city on Saturday night. She wasn’t interested, but I persisted. But Sunday was completely terrible. I decided it wasn’t worth all the stress to try to pursue her when she wasn’t sure she wanted me back and having my pursuit make it so there were moments I had no one to talk to. So after we got back to our apartment complex, I went to her place and told her I was giving up. Then I bawled.

He wasn’t afraid to squeeze her butt, but her mother wasn’t standing right there.

For about the next month we were nothing more than friends. It hurt, but Roger would speak to me again and I slowly got used to the idea of being no more than her friend. Then toward the end of our time there she came back to me. We had this agreement that when we said “good-bye” to each other I’d grab her butt and she’d grab mine, like Jack Nicholson and Shirley MacLaine did in Terms of Endearment. I chickened out, though, because her mom came to pick her up and I couldn’t do that in front of her mother.

I went home to California and she returned to school for a final semester. I worked construction and she finished her last few classes. I had plans to drive to see her. One night I called and she was an absolute snot to me on the phone, one of the few times I ever experienced her being anything other than wonderful. A few minutes later she called me back and apologized, but told me not to come visit. It was over. That moment I said “good-bye” in Alexandria, Virginia was the last time I ever saw her. I think I called her later when the Lakers won the championship to rub it in. I was still angry and pretended it was good natured ribbing, but she saw through it. I think that was the last conversation for a while.

I didn’t take that long to recover. I dated a couple of women that summer and another one the fall semester. Months later when I was again able to recall how good a person she was I wrote her a letter. I don’t remember at all the contents. I probably wrote something about wanting to still be her friend or some such sentiment. She called me late one afternoon, waking me from sleep after pulling an all-nighter to finish a communications law project. From then on we’d talk once in a while. We started as friends, dabbled in something else and last I spoke with her we were still friends.

The first day my first semester back I was sitting in my communications law class and Roger walked in. We hadn’t left D.C. on good terms with each other, because at the time the woman who shall not be named was with me again. But when he walked in he acted as though there had never been any animosity between him and me. He came and sat next to me and was as chummy as ever. He lived in the apartment complex next to mine and we ended up knowing a lot of the same people. I dated a girl who was friends with many of the guys from Roger’s hometown. Roger told them that I had encouraged him to after a woman and then went after her myself. The girl I dated asked me about it, and I told her it was true, then explained the context. I’m not sure it mattered.

My last semester I went back to D.C. at the invitation of Roger’s former boss to do Roger’s old job. I didn’t do anything all that well until the last three weeks. I wanted to get work there, but didn’t make it happen. My parents moved to Utah while I was away and I ended up there for far more years than I ever intended. The girl who was my friend and briefly my girlfriend married a guy she worked with. Now it appears he plans to run for Congress.

Roger died a few years later.

I have friends who went through a kind of ritual with their roommates if a former girlfriend mistreated one of them. They’d refuse to say her name. I’m not saying her name here, but for a different reason.

This entry led with me telling how I’d sent an e-mail to someone I probably never would have worried about had I not come across his name and had an easy way to contact him. A simple Google search and suddenly you can fill in blanks about names you barely remember. I don’t think I said anything incriminating here, but I don’t want someone to Google the candidate’s name or that of his wife and find this story, not now anyway. I’ll only inflict attention on people who deserve it or welcome it. It seems silly that I remember so much from part of my life more than 22 years ago. It’s more silly that I’d Google her husband’s name, but the Internet often satisfies my curiosity in finding out how people are doing. I can’t imagine not caring.

Every once in a while I read a book I enjoy so much that I read it twice. I just finished one for the first time that I’m sure I’ll go through again.

The Blind Side tells of Michael Oher, who plays left tackle at Ole Miss. If the story were that simple the book wouldn’t be much more than the standard sports bio. If any of us had met Oher and his family before he became a teenager, we would all have predicted much less for him. Through a sequence of chances he now finds himself an all SEC lineman and a surefire NFL prospect.

On Saturday he may not have lived up to that reputation. Ole Miss lost to Vanderbilt 31-17 and Vandy linebackers got behind the Ole Miss line for six sacks.

Even if he doesn’t end up in the NFL, which seems unlikely, his life story intertwined with the evolution of the left tackle makes for a fascinating read by Michael Lewis, who also wrote Moneyball. This book is getting less attention than Moneyball, but I enjoyed it more.

I bought the book a couple weeks ago after finally making it all the way through Hubris. That book was dense. Interesting, yes. Important as well, but dense. Lewis’ book is a breeze to read.

Oh, and there’s a BYU angle to it as well.

Leonard Pitts Jr. on the latest Harry Potter book:

My personal gag reflex was triggered when a certain newspaper, which we’ll call ”The Miami Herald,” published a piece, complete with quotes from worried mothers and the obligatory advice from talking heads, on how to help your children cope if Harry is killed.

Beg pardon, but I seem to recall that a previous generation of children saw Bambi’s mother killed by the hunter without the need for grief counselors standing by.

My weekend was pretty uneventful. There was this.

Campbell nearly completed a third TD score just before the break, but hard-hitting Indians corner Denny “Dirt” Kerstetter separated Jordan Smith from the football to prevent further damage. Still, Steel-High was rolling.

Not for long, as Steven Gardner wheeled 96 yards with the second-half kick to bring the Indians within 21-14. Gardner was hemmed in by three or four would-be tacklers at his own 30, but managed to spin out of trouble and go yard.

“When they ran that back, I knew that was a major momentum swing and they had the momentum,” said Young, who amassed 19 of his 32 carries in the second half. “They had all their fans behind them. “I knew the dogfight was coming.”

Said Darryl Kerstetter: “[Gardner] had a great run, breaking tackles. It was all heart. That was a hell of a run.”

We still lost.