The Seahawk

An old friend posted something on Facebook about how the football team at our high school was playing a championship game tonight and that her nephew was on the team.

This kind of blew my mind on a few levels. First off, how could her nephew be on the high school football team? He was in a stroller at our graduation. There’s no way he’s old enough. Then I did the math:

Current Year – Year of Graduation = Of course he’s old enough to be on the high school team, don’t be an idiot.

Then on to the piece about the team being in the championship game. There are so many levels of disinterest involved here that make getting this information to me a near impossibility.

First off, there’s the fact that I am nowhere near my hometown, so it’s not like I’d accidentally read about them in a newspaper. Add to thatmy complete lack of interest in both school spirit and and football. My interest in football wanes the younger the players get.

NFL — I’ll half pay attention to the playoffs, but that’s more so I can get mentally prepared for Super Cake. I’ll watch the Super Bowl, but I’m more interested in the commercials.

College — Holy shit. DO NOT CARE.

High School — It’s a little creepy how readily you know the heights and weights of a bunch of 16- and 17-year-old boys.

Theoretically, a football game played with a bunch of people in their 80s would fascinate me beyond belief.

And then there’s the fact that I’m from a region where no one cares about high school sports. Unless you have friends or family on the team, you generally don’t care. This is one of the reasons why I couldn’t get into Friday Night Lights. Everyone in town is interested in the high school football team to the point where they discuss it on the radio? I remember one scene where some dude started harassing the coach’s daughter because the team lost a game. Granted that dude’s an asshole, even in that town, but seriously. Don’t these people have lives?

Point being, this team could win the Nobel Prize for high school football, and I’d probably not hear about it unless one of my Facebook friends had family on the team.

I have been to one of their games. It was in 1989. I wasn’t even going to that school yet. I only went because my brother was the mascot. It rained and they lost, thus killing any glimmer of interest.

This team never had a reputation (in my mind, anyway) for being all that great, so when I heard that they were in the championship game, I didn’t think that much of it, but I decided to look into it and see just how well they did this year.

Holy shit. Based on the scores over the season, they’re doing really well. They’re not just undefeated, they’re really undefeated. There were no squeakers, nail-biters or last minute heroics. They’re scored an average of 41.6 points per game, which means nothing until I tell you that they’ve allowed 4.2 points per game. Four of the ten games were shutouts. The game with the smallest point margin was against they team they’re playing tonight. They won 28-0. That was the only time they didn’t win by at least five touchdowns.

I don’t give a shit about football, but that’s kind of incredible.

I guess my point is, I’m interested in the outcome of this team’s game for the first time in 24 years.

What the hell just happened? Did I just write an entry about high school football?