Full-length game, first point, last point, life is good

          A full-field game with eight people!  Perfect! Before the eighth player arrived, I volunteered to be on the team with 3 because my heart was filled with child-like excitement.  I even scored the first point.

          We traveled up and down the field, catching, throwing, tipping, intercepting.  It was a beautiful game. I was not able to run at top speed because of leg soreness, but I was able to jog at just the right places, and I was able to do some cuts and misdirection that allowed me to get open and catch passes.  Oh, how I love this game!

          After about 40 minutes, my legs began to warn me that they were getting tight and unhappy. So, I slowed down even more.  Pretty soon, the other team called for a three-minute water break. Although I didn’t stop moving, and didn’t even drink water, my legs took this opportunity to seize up even further to the point where I determined that I should not run anymore.

          In a game where every player is running at top speed, it is challenging to maintain a walking cadence—similar to the difficulty encountered if one wants to refrain from eating cake when a good-looking piece is offered while in a room of cake-eaters.

After the break, whenever my team would receive the throw at the beginning of the point, and I walked leisurely down the field. A sprite young woman came to me and assumed the typical bent legs-arms up-bouncy posture of a competent defender. She was surely confused as I made no attempt to be free from her and continued slowly forward with a completely unconcerned attitude.  At least two times, teammates quite adeptly threw to each other and scored before I even made it two-thirds of the way down the field. 

We finished the evening in the customary manner with a 5-point game. During the majority of the evening, we score points and don’t generally keep track.  Only if one team is dramatically of higher ability and scores too easily do we take notice and change the make-up of the teams. When we are nearing the end of our hour on the field, someone might yell, “Game to 5!” From that point, the first team to score 5 points is the winner, and the game is over. 

Last night, with the score tied at 4, I decided I would “come alive” and I ran a bit.  This running produced, not more pain and injury, but a game winning catch in the end zone by me!  So, during the first full-length game in 8 months, I was fortunate enough to score both the first point of the evening AND the last point.  Life is good.