I was in marching band in high school. To be clear, I was in band front in which I held the American flag or school banner and I twirled a rifle. I never played a musical instrument other than piano, badly. But I was actually pretty good at twirling.
For three straight years I attended every single football game—home and away—of our little rural Pennsylvania high school’s not-so-terrible team. I moved to PA when I was thirteen and graduated from a school that wasn’t much different than something out of Friday Night Lights. My class was less than 150 students. Everyone knew each other. Coach was a first name and a highly respected community title. Everyone and their entire extended family attended high school games and it didn’t matter if they had a kid on the field or not. These games were often the only weekend entertainment around, and even in high school I thought it both pitiful and charming that the same people were on the benches every year, getting older, raising kids, going gray, still showing up for their alma mater. I now think it’s sweet, and yet, you’d never catch me going to any football game, let alone a high school one.
It was great culture to be part of though. Our marching band family, even though we never much mingled with the cheerleading and footballer family at school, were all part of something much bigger on the field. There was a unity in cheering for your team that transcended high school hierarchy, even if only for an evening, and I can’t speak for the rest of the group, but I relished it. The long bus rides, the singing, the chanting, the cheers, the facepaint, the homecomings, the winning. Most of all the winning.
We had a tradition between our town and the neighboring town in which every year before the big rival game, kids raced to “the rock”, which was a giant slab of slate—a fitting moniker for our Slate Belt town. Whichever school got there first got to paint it their school colors. I don’t remember how kids decided upon teams, and who got to be part of the race up the mountain, but in November 1991, when I was a sophomore, I had planned on joining in the tradition. It was a freezing cold evening and I stood in the street with my boyfriend, and a few others I don’t even remember now, waiting on directions to the trail. Instead of directions however, we received rumors of someone carrying a gun and so we decided to not go. Early the next morning a student from the rival school was found dead at the base of the mountain. He’d fallen—not been shot—and it put an end to the official tradition. I haven’t been back to that area in about fifteen years so I’m not sure what color the rock is now.
When I was twenty I married that high school sweetheart, (and an unsettling amount of my classmates followed suit). Everyone had a team except for me. Other than my three years in band, I had zero football knowledge. I grew up with hippy parents who grew vegetables, read books, and drank too much while playing music or card games. We didn’t watch TV, let alone sports. But everyone in my town and new family seemed to have been raised with football as religion. Since I didn’t care one way or another, it was easy to simply be nearby during a televised game—making food, laughing at commercials, playing with the kids. For decades, football was nothing but a fond high school memory and something my husband’s family seemed to think was ordained by god. Sometimes I had to bare the brunt of a lot of ribbing. “No football team? Never saw Rocky? Voted for Obama? What are you a communist?”
Think Kevin Can F*ck Himself; very familiar territory.
To maybe no one’s surprise at this point in the story, I eventually divorced that husband. For more than ten blissful years I didn’t have to witness so much as a superbowl. I was unchurched, gratefully.
And then in January 2023, my current sweetheart was diagnosed with stage 4 esophageal cancer somewhat out of the blue. It was nothing at all, until all of a sudden it was all-encompassing. He went from some flu-like symptoms and difficulty swallowing to needing a feeding tube in just a matter of weeks. When the Super Bowl aired, he could do little more than sit on a couch and watch TV, so that’s what we did. I couldn’t tell you who played—as usual I didn’t care. What I did care about, what I will always remember, is making him a requested dish: buffalo chicken dip, something I abhor, but what would become his last meal for a long, long time. I will always remember finding the lump in his neck that night that would become one of the diseased lymph nodes that made his diagnosis far more advanced and scary. But I will also remember having a really good time watching that stupid game, him explaining plays I missed or things players did that were apparently impressive. And the fact that dip went over so well.
This January will be two years since that game and in the last two years I could count on one hand how many more games we’ve watched together. Last year he made the dip. It’s not something either of us live for (the dip or the football), but I will admit it’s been fun watching together. I’m usually half-watching, half-reading and he’s also usually splitting his time between watching and painting, but it’s been cozy and fun and while I still do not care who wins, I’m rooting for his team like a good wife should. ;-)