Goal Line Page 8

  “Skip it, Ronde. I’ve heard it all before,” said Cody glumly.

  “It’s all about the team in the end,” Ronde reminded him.

  “Easy for you to say,” said Cody. “You’re the big star, and you play every down of every game.”

  “So far,” Tiki pointed out.

  “Stay positive, Cody,” Ronde advised. “Remember last year. Remember what it took for us to win.”

  Cody gave him a long look, then nodded. “Ah, you’re right, Ronde,” he said, sighing. “I’m being kinda selfish, aren’t I?”

  “No, I wouldn’t say that.…”

  “I just said it for you,” said Cody. “But that’s over. It’s not about me, like you said. It’s all about the team.”

  Later, when they were getting up to go, Cody grabbed Ronde by the arm and said, “Thanks for that, man. I needed a reminder.”

  When they were outside again, Tiki looked at his twin in wonder. “Ronde, you’re the one who should have the advice column.”

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” Ronde said, smiling and waving him off.

  “Why not?” Tiki asked. “You’re the one who’s always got the good advice, not me.”

  “You’re the one who won the essay contest, not me,” Ronde shot back.

  “Seriously, though,” said Tiki. “How do you always know what to say to people? I mean like with Cody. That was impressive, dude. You really got him off his high horse.”

  Ronde shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “I figure most people already know what they should do to solve their problems. They just want somebody else to tell them they’re right. That way they know they’re just like everybody else, and not some kind of freak.”

  Tiki nodded slowly as they walked, letting Ronde’s words sink in.

  “Anyway,” Ronde continued, “I’ve got no time for an advice column. I’ve got to concentrate on gaining some inches and pounds, not to mention As and Bs.”

  “I don’t have time either,” Tiki admitted. “I heard today that six letters came to the Weekly Eagle office for me to answer! Six! In one day! Can you imagine? What am I supposed to do, quit school and do this full-time?”

  Ronde shook his head. “I forgot to mention, I especially need to concentrate on football—and so do you, Brother.” He gave Tiki a meaningful look.

  “What?” said Tiki, challenging him. “You got something on your mind, say it.”

  Ronde stopped walking and faced his twin. “Okay. You saw how distracted you got at practice, and this thing you’re doing is just getting bigger and bigger. How’re we supposed to win another championship if you’re busy thinking about your newspaper column?”

  Tiki didn’t answer. He just looked at the ground, then started walking again.

  Ronde followed him and caught up quickly. “Well?” he asked.

  “I’m thinking,” Tiki said, frowning, letting Ronde’s words sink in as they kept on walking into the sunset, headed for home.

  The Eagles were 2–0, which, when you looked at it, was pretty good, considering they’d started 0–2 last year, and then come back to win it all. It made 2–0 look like a big improvement.

  Still, Ronde thought, they’d been very lucky so far. Their first game had been against an easy opponent. Last week had been much tougher, and they’d nearly lost.

  This week, against the Blue Ridge Bears, would be another tough test—the second of three away games in a row against last year’s play-off teams. Next week it would be Pulaski, but Ronde didn’t even want to think that far ahead. As tough as the Bears were, the Pulaski Wildcats were even tougher.

  The Eagles were noisy and confident on the bus ride across town—too confident, in Ronde’s humble opinion. He would have preferred a quiet bus, with every player inside his own head, collecting his thoughts, getting his mental game together.

  Team spirit was fine, for what it was worth, but spirit alone wasn’t going to beat the Bears today. They’d have to bring their “A” game, mentally as well as physically.

  Coach Wheeler had prepared them well, as usual, showing lots of videos and drilling the team until the rookies looked and acted like veterans. But would they be able to keep it together under game conditions, especially if the Eagles fell behind early?

  Sure enough, the game began badly. During the opening kickoff the Bears surprised the Eagles with an onside kick, which led to a fumble recovered by the kicking team. Two plays later the stunned Eagles were down 7–0.

  During the ensuing kickoff, the team was prepared for another surprise, and it got one, although it wasn’t an onside kick. Instead the Bears hit a squib kick, forcing one of the Eagles blockers to grab the ball. He barely hung on to it, and finally the offense got to work.

  Luke Frazier was a good blocker, and he was getting better every week. He could carry the ball too, which allowed the Eagles to pull some surprise plays of their own, like the double reverse, and the handoff lateral pass. Coach Wheeler wasn’t calling any of those plays early on, though. He wanted to see if his Eagles could move the ball against Blue Ridge.

  They couldn’t. Not even Tiki was able to break free from the powerful arms of the Blue Ridge linebackers. After two hard-won first downs, the Eagles were forced to punt the ball away.

  The first quarter went quickly, with very few stops of the clock. Both teams were trying to advance on the ground and not take too many chances. But it was the Bears who were gaining more yards, winning the battle of field position. As the quarter came to an end, they were threatening again, third and goal on the Eagles seven.

  The gun sounded, the whistle blew, and the teams trotted to the other end of the field to begin the new quarter. Ronde knew the Bears would be looking to the air on third down. With little room to maneuver, he guessed they’d shoot for the end zone. So he could lie back and wait for his man to approach, keeping his eyes on the quarterback in case he decided to roll out or run with the ball.

  The ball was snapped, and Ronde kept his eyes squarely on the quarterback. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw his man make a move and head for the corner of the end zone. Knowing what would happen next, he sped off after him. He reached his man just as the ball did.

  Ronde reached out and batted it away. But instead of it going out of bounds, the ball bounced off the top of the receiver’s helmet and back in toward the end zone. Before it hit the ground, it was grabbed by one of the Bears’ other receivers for a touchdown!

  Ronde couldn’t believe it. He’d made the play perfectly, and yet he’d cost his team a touchdown! An extra point later it was 14–0, and things were going even worse than they had gone the week before.

  On the sidelines things were ominously quiet. Gone was the noise and the confidence the team had shown on the bus ride over. In its place was a gloomy hush, filled with dread and the smell of defeat.

  What now? Ronde wondered how they could ever turn this around? And what else could the team do to play the way they could? The way they used to?

  Okay, so they’d had a few unlucky breaks so far. But Blue Ridge seemed better prepared than the Eagles. They had obviously been thinking about this game, and about beating the Eagles, since last year’s play-off game. The Bears were a team on a mission. How were the Eagles going to stop them, now that they were already in a deep, deep hole?

  Late in the second quarter things got even worse. With the team behind by 14–0, Coach Wheeler had no choice but to take to the passing game. Manny Alvaro, now an eighth grader, was talented but still inexperienced. His two wide receivers were seventh graders, right out of elementary school with almost no game experience.

  It was a recipe for disaster, and Ronde wished Coach would have stuck to the running game. Ronde was sure that if he’d done that the defense could have held the Bears scoreless the rest of the way, and the Eagles would still have had time to catch up.

  But with Tiki going nowhere, and Luke showing his inexperience as a blocker, Wheeler obviously felt it was time to try something different.

  Bad m
ove. Manny overthrew Frank Amadou on a long bomb on first down. Then, after a screen pass to Tiki that was almost intercepted, Manny made a bad decision. Felix and Frank Amadou were supposed to do a crossing pattern. Frank, though, messed up his cut, and the two brothers wound up right next to each other, along with both cornerbacks and the free safety.

  In spite of there being a crowd, Manny threw the ball straight into the traffic. It was batted around by at least three players before being intercepted by the safety and run back all the way to the Eagles twenty-two!

  On the very next play, the Bears ran a quarterback option to the weak side. Ronde, all the way across the field, could only watch in disbelief as the quarterback leapt over two Eagles defenders and into the end zone for another score!

  A loud groan went up from the Eagles bench. Ronde tore at his hair in frustration, but he couldn’t take the time to dwell on the situation. It was his turn to take the kickoff. With only forty-five seconds left in the half, he took the kick, knowing that if the Eagles didn’t score now, they’d be down by twenty-one points at the half.

  Somehow he had to give his team a chance to put some points on the board!

  After grabbing the ball out of the air, he sped straight downfield, sidestepping one, two, three defenders. They were left grabbing air while Ronde kept on running.

  “Good things come in small packages,” he kept telling himself as he dodged bigger, slower, clumsier players who could have crushed him if they’d been able to catch him. “Good things come in … small … packages.”

  He stutter-stepped his way past another of the Bears, and broke into open grass. There was the end zone, straight ahead of him. Nothing between him and it but—

  “OOOF!” Somebody smacked into him just before he hit the goal line. Somebody he hadn’t seen coming. Ronde hit the ground, and the ball went flying away from him.

  “Nooooo!!” he cried in vain, as two huge, beefy Bears fell on the ball in their own end zone. An Eagles player touched them up for a safety. The Eagles were on the board, all right. Only instead of a seven-point touchdown, they’d scored only a two-point safety!

  The gun sounded the end of the half with the Eagles trailing 21–2. The team headed into the locker room, and Ronde followed them, wondering whether his team had any fight left in them.

  Ronde entered the visitors’ locker room to find a downcast bunch of Eagles. His first instinct was to say something, but then he remembered what Tiki always said. You couldn’t try the same tactic time after time and expect it to keep working the same way.

  “Come on, you guys,” Ronde urged. “Don’t give up now. We’ve got thirty minutes of playing time left!”

  A few heads looked up at him, a few pairs of eyes with almost no hope left in them. Over in the corner Coach Wheeler stood leaning against a locker, arms folded over his chest, waiting to see what his captains had to say before taking the floor himself.

  Ronde looked at Tiki, waiting for him to say something. He was the famous public speaker, after all. He couldn’t just expect his twin to do all the talking when the game was on the line.

  Tiki looked around the room slowly. “You guys look like a pack of beaten dogs,” he said. “Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m not beaten. Ronde, are you beaten?”

  “Nuh-uh, not me,” Ronde said quickly.

  “Let me tell you something,” Tiki continued, “and you seventh graders listen up especially. We’re gonna win this game, okay? I guarantee it.”

  Everyone was listening now. Tiki’s sudden—and to Ronde’s thinking, reckless—guarantee had gotten their total attention.

  “We’ve got a bunch of veterans on this team who know how to play the game and who know how to win. Right, Paco?”

  “That’s right!” Paco said, with a look of fierce determination on his chubby face.

  “We’ve come from behind before. Well, maybe not this far behind, but so what? Who wants to stand up and tell me we can’t do it?”

  He looked around the room. The other Eagles were looking around too, waiting to see if anyone wanted to argue with Tiki.

  No one did. “Good,” said Tiki. “I guess you all agree with me, then.” He waited. Silence. “Well? Do you agree with me? Are we gonna get up off the floor and beat these guys?”

  “Yeah!” said several of the Eagles.

  “I hear something, but I can’t make it out,” Tiki said, cupping his ear.

  “YEAH!!” everyone shouted.

  Tiki nodded slowly. “That’s what I thought. When that gun sounds, I want to see every one of us ready to play.” He looked over at Coach Wheeler. “Coach? It’s all yours.”

  Wheeler smiled. “You heard it, gentlemen. A victory has been guaranteed. Are you all gonna make a liar out of Tiki?”

  “NO!!” everyone roared.

  “Are we gonna win this game?”

  “YEAH!”

  Wheeler clapped his hands. “Okay, then. No more of those gloomy faces. Let’s all think about how we’re gonna play our game. Veterans, this game is on your shoulders. Rookies, just relax and follow the veterans’ lead. Be ready for the ball to bounce your way—because it will, just when you least expect it. Be opportunists, and let’s make every break count!”

  As they made their way back onto the field, Ronde glanced over at Tiki, who was unusually quiet and intense.

  He sure hoped Tiki was right and they wound up winning. Because if they lost after that guarantee of his, Tiki was going to look like a total loser.

  Down by nineteen points, the Eagles had to start out on defense. With their big lead the Bears just kept the ball on the ground, eating up as much clock as they could, and keeping the ball out of the hands of the Eagles offense, especially Tiki Barber.

  Ronde was getting frustrated. Why didn’t they ever throw the ball to Ronde’s man and give Ronde a chance to make a play? He couldn’t even blitz and sack the quarterback if the Bears were just going to run it every play!

  He could only hope that the Eagles’ defensive line and linebackers could hold against the relentless Blue Ridge ground attack. Rob Fiorilla, Sam Scarfone’s replacement, was big, strong, and fast, but until now he hadn’t shown a nose for the ball—that instinct you got from playing a lot, that told you where the runner was going to be heading.

  Now, though, he seemed to be learning fast. On two plays in a row he stuffed the run, stopping it cold. That brought up a third and nine at midfield. Ronde smiled, rubbing his hands together. This was his chance. On third and long the Bears would have to pass.

  Coach sent in the play—a safety blitz. That meant that Ronde would have to dog his man, staying close to him while the safety made a run for the quarterback. If the safety failed to get to the quarterback, Ronde would be alone on his man, with no help.

  Well, that was fine with him. He was as ready as he’d ever be. He stared across at his man—a tall, rangy boy with long, powerful legs. Ronde’d been able to stay with him all day, though, because the kid’s moves weren’t all that great.

  Now Ronde gave him a hard bump coming off the line, so that the kid was in no shape to receive the pass. Ronde looked over to see the quarterback scrambling away from the blitzing safety.

  Ronde’s man was getting up now, signaling for the pass to come his way. The quarterback saw him, and Ronde did too. Diving in front of the receiver, Ronde snatched the pass out of thin air and held on to it for the interception!

  It was the break the Eagles desperately needed. Now the offense took over, with Tiki shouldering the load. He slashed right through the Bears defensive line like a hot knife through butter, eating up yards by the dozen. In no time at all the Eagles were knocking at the door.

  Manny took the snap at the three, and tossed it quickly and softly over the heads of the defenders, and into the waiting arms of Frank Amadou. Touchdown, Eagles!

  On their next offensive series of downs, the Bears kept to the ground again, still using the same strategy. Only this time the Eagles were ready for it. They loaded up the
ir linebackers to stuff the run, and after a couple of first downs, they were able to force another third and long situation.

  This time the Bears threw to the side of the field farthest from Ronde, avoiding him. They connected for a first down and were able to use up most of the third quarter before the Eagles defense finally held firm and forced a long field goal attempt, which missed.

  The Eagles offense now started to mix in some quick passes. Some to Tiki, a couple to Justin, and one bullet to Felix Amadou that set the Eagles up at the Bears twenty. That’s when Coach Wheeler called for the Statue of Liberty play.

  It was a trick play, one they’d practiced since last year but had used only once. On the snap, Manny dropped back to pass, held his arm back—and Tiki grabbed the ball from him, running around the end. Before the defense knew what had happened, Tiki had turned the corner and was heading for pay dirt!

  Only a last-minute tackle stopped him short of the goal line, but they scored on the next play anyway, just in time for the end of the third quarter.

  They switched ends of the field and kicked off to the Bears. Ronde flew down the field and was about to pile into the ballcarrier when he was blocked in the back and taken down. He got up yelling, trying to get the ref’s attention. “That was a penalty!” he screamed, but it was no use. The refs were not watching. Their eyes were downfield, where the Blue Ridge return man was scampering all the way into the end zone!

  “NOOO!!!” Ronde moaned, grabbing his helmet with both hands. An extra point later it was 28–16, Bears.

  “Never mind!” he yelled at the stunned Eagles players as he got back to the sideline. “We’re still going to win this one! Stay focused! The ball’s gonna bounce our way. Just be ready for that one big break!”

  He clapped his hands with all his might, and some of the players started nodding and agreeing with him, clapping their hands along with his.

  Seeing that they were going to be okay, Ronde ran back onto the field to receive the kickoff. He got the ball up to midfield and then turned it over to Tiki and the offense. “Let’s go!” he shouted to his brother.