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After ten yards he had broken a couple of tackles and suddenly had all this open field in front of him.
Now I got out of my seat again.
“Let’s go!”I yelled in Danny’s suite.
The last person between him and the end zone was someone who actually used to refer to himself as Touchdown Ted. Now he was trying to prevent one. He had no chance, even though he clumsily tried to throw himself in front of Andre DeWitt.
Andre ran right over him, knocking Ted’s helmet sideways.
Suddenly the Patriots led by only four points with a quarter of football still left to play.
“We’re not out of this,” Danny said.
“Don’t talk.”
It was still 21–17 when Billy McGee somehow started to look like a real quarterback and not a total shit. It was on a drive that started at the Wolves’ ten yard line, with four minutes left. He completed two straight passes to get us away from our own end zone. Then two more.
Just like that, we were driving.
It was finally third and ten, three minutes to go, at the Patriots’ thirty-eight yard line. Billy dropped back and was under pressure again from a Patriots blitz. They’d been blitzing him all game long once they saw he was a couple of steps slow.
Only this time he got loose, heading for the sideline and the first-down marker.
At the last moment, it was a question of whether he would get to the marker before the Patriots’ star outside linebacker, a monster of a player named Anfernee McCarron, could get tohim.
Billy could have run out-of-bounds. He’d still have one more shot at the first down if he didn’t make it.
But he didn’t run out-of-bounds. Billy McGee was a player now and not a punk, almost laying out as he lunged for the marker.
He didn’t make it.
Anfernee McCarron hit him as hard as I’d seen any quarterback—whether standing in the pocket or running in the open field—get hit all season. Somehow Billy, even short of the first down, still had the ball in his right hand when he hit the ground.
I realized I had moved to the front of the suite now to get a better look at what everybody in Wolves Stadium, suddenly very quiet, could see down on the field.
Billy McGee was lying motionless on his back.
He stayed that way for the next several minutes, Dr. Ron Barnes and Ryan Morrissey kneeling next to him.
Finally, I saw the flatbed cart making its way slowly out of the tunnel and heading for the sideline, where Billy McGee still hadn’t moved.
Then the trainers were getting Billy onto a stretcher and securing his head and neck, lifting the stretcher onto the injury cart.
The crowd was standing and cheering then. At the last moment, before the cart disappeared back into the tunnel, Billy McGee managed to lift his hand into the air before it dropped back to his side.
Then he was gone.
One Hundred Four
I DROVE AROUND FORa long time after I finally left the stadium, not listening to any of the sports stations as the hosts recapped the game, not listening to music.
Not listening to anything.
I even stopped by Hunters Point High School, got out and walked on the field, trying to remember what it had been like, trying to recapture the feeling I’d had the day my Bears had beaten Basin Park to win the championship, the kids acting as if they’d won the championship of the whole world.
I didn’t decide where I was going when I was back in the car until I was almost all the way there, as if I owned one of those self-driving cars and it had programmed itself.
When I’d finally made my way down to the parking lot after the game, all the traffic gone by then, even my brother Danny long gone, I’d only thought about going home, being alone there just because I was tired of being alone in the suite after Danny left.
