Archway to Victory

By Uncle Hans

This week we were off for Brownsville Tennessee to play Haywood Academy. It's their first year of football and they are an online school. They field a small numbers team that promise to be a fairly even match for us. The problem is the 1200 mile road trip. That involves two full days of bus riding, each way. We left Thursday morning at 8. The school cafeteria packed us sandwiches to eat at a wayside rest......

A few hours later we stopped at another wayside and did a walk through practice.

The team slept in a church school gymnasium. Hotels are expensive.

Because we had a couple of extra hours on Friday, the coach arranged for us to visit the famous Arch in St Louis. Here we are in the viewing room 62 floors above St Louis. The guys really appreciated a little tourist stop to break up the long bus trip.

Late on Friday this strange white stuff started showing up in the fields.

We knew we were a long way from home....

We got off to a 14 to 0 bad start with some miscues on the offense. Then the weeks of training at practice and the frustration of a losing season all kicked in at once and we ran up 41 points.

Our running back, Landon, scored 6 touchdowns. He almost got two more. One was an interception which got called back and one was a 100 yard run after an interception that came up a few yards short of the goal line as the clock ran out on the first half.

All the disappointment of a long, hard, losing season, melted away with this sweet victory!

This game against a new club without conference or association affiliation was my best hope for a few plays on the field. It was not to happen, as I did not obtain the proper permission to become eligible.

35 years of dreaming about what it would feel like to step on to the playing field at 65 has ended.

It is what it is.........

Uncle Hans

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