Ashland, Oregon 1993

What you are to be, you are now becoming, was posted in the locker room below the scattering of wooden grave markers bearing the names of vanquished opponents, the Japanese Rising Sun flag and the ‘89 and ‘91 state championship trophies. Out on the field, the 1993 Grizzlies grappled gently in T-shirts and shorts, their white helmets reflecting the early evening sun. Thursdays were walk-throughs. The players reached out for one another at three-quarter speed, and closed simulated tackles in a hug.

Each evening a cool, naïve breeze blew through town, one that suited twilight practice. It ran up East Main Street through the plaza, billowing the newly-hung Shakespeare Festival flags among the town’s green and yellow plum trees. It blew through the players’ Honda Civics and 4-wheel drives where cassettes of Eazy E and Metallica and Cypress Hill lay on the ratty passenger seats. And it twitched the pink ticker tape atop the goal posts. The Ashland Grizzlies were ranked no. 1 in the state, and according to a USA Today pre-season poll, No. 6 in the West. No Oregon team had ever had such expectations.

Photo: Alexander Black

Twenty years later, fullback Kacy Curtis, would stand up in the middle of an interview to pour out half a beer, rinse the bottle, dry it with a towel, and then, with nothing else to take his mind off the conversation, open another. “Eight carries?” he said, standing at the sink. “The leading rusher touches the ball eight times?”

“You smell the grass? You hear the crowd — visualize it.” Jowly O-line coach Russ Cooley scanned the boys proudly through his thick glasses. To end Thursday practice, they took a knee and bowed their heads in prayer, their hot faces freed from their helmets. Apart from the handful who were born in Ashland, they’d moved from Homer or Chicago or Coronado Island, in the first or third or ninth grade, reared in trailers or at friends’ houses or in homes with hot tubs, the sons of teachers and attorneys and single mothers who had chosen to go back-to-the-land in a small town: population 15,000, liberal and rural, five crowded elementary schools.

“Gaston, I see you in the backfield with your helmet in the quarterback’s chest — smell the blood.”

“Curtis, they can’t bring you down tonight — smell the blood!”

Players clenched their jaws when Cooley spoke their name. They didn’t want for encouragement in Ashland, but they’d never experienced such discipline before.

Coach Cooley had already decided who would lead them out. He carried a fresh-made wooden cross, painted white and dipped blood red at the tip. On it was the name of week four’s opponent: South Medford.

“I want all of you to look up at the scoreboard now. Visualize it. See the lights. See fourth quarter. See: 45-0. You see that?” He let them wait in the silent breeze, listening to themselves swallow.

He almost whispered. “Steinman, lead ‘em out.”

In the first three weeks, Ashland had outscored its opponents, including the bruising, sixth-ranked Roseburg Indians, 105-14. Everyone looked like a star. Senior Ethan Titus returned the season opening kickoff 85 yards, untouched, carrying the ball like a torch 20 yards out of the end zone. Beastman Darren Gaston broke the Eagle Point punter’s leg on a blocked punt. And returning first-team All-State slotback David Boekenoogen racked up five touchdowns on 361 smooth-to-the-outside all-purpose yards. “I saw what I wanted to see,” head coach Jim Nagel had told reporters.

1,160 total yards to 476 — and the starters hadn’t played a single down in a fourth quarter.

“Expect Ashland in a blowout” Ashland’s Daily Tidings newspaper predicted over South Medford.

Above: Jeremy Steinman's senior photo

The quiet on the practice field doubled as the players followed their quarterback, jogging with the white grave marker along the sideline. Jeremy Steinman couldn’t ignore how strange and spiritual this moment felt performed in broad daylight: A procession of young men in single file bearing a cross, as the aging janitor drug a trashcan out of the gymnasium doors, and stopped to watch.

Steinman was a complicated star: His tall, golden boy frame and River Phoenix hair was hard not to look at. He was a gregarious kid, a lazy valedictorian, but with something behind his eyes when people laughed at his jokes. He gauged the world around him, which is what made him a good quarterback — that he could simultaneously play and analyze the game — but was also what kept him from being a great quarterback: he was never fully in his body, never purely instinctual.

The significance of carrying the cross was not lost on him. South was the last team to defeat Ashland two years before, at home, when they blocked a punt in the waning moments of the game. Since then, Ashland had compiled 15 straight Southern Oregon Conference wins and one state championship.

They fanned out across the 50-yard line on either side of Steinman, who held the cross up aloft by two hands. He rose an inch or two, straightening himself like a spear, and when he charged, screaming with his teammates towards the end zone to plant the stake in the grass, all the questions from alumnae and boosters and radio commentators - about so many first-year starters and so many two-way players, and about a quarterback controversy — seemed to have been answered.

Week 4, October 1 Ashland vs South Medford

But the following night the players’ girlfriends with bear paws painted on their cheeks, would barely hear the pep band as they rested their chins on the bleacher railing. A 14-11 halftime deficit sat on the scoreboard, and South wasn’t even ranked. Before the half, a key Steinman interception and disastrous 38-yard South Medford touchdown run had brought a handful of the Ashland crowd to their feet, but only to squint across the chilly field at the blue mob of visiting Medford fans who pointed back, jeering them.

Photo: Thomas Glassman

After, on KRDV-TV’s 11 o’clock news, Friday Night Football analyst Joe Brett reported, “To Ashland’s credit — it’s the first time they’ve been tested, it’s the first time they’ve been behind all year, and they responded like champions.”

Early in the third quarter Kacy Curtis, the wrestler-turned-fullback who liked to seek out safeties to run over, sprinted to the sideline and stood on his tiptoes, watching the action as trainers re-taped his injured wrist. He wasn’t going to be left out. They were going to control the ball. They were going to grind and Curtis was their grinder. He charged back onto the field before they’d made the last cut in his tape, to batter his way to 222 yards and two decisive second-half touchdowns.

Postgame was the first time he’d seen his hot breathless face reflected in a television camera. He had grown up in his older brother’s shadow, out near the highway in a trailer with their mom. Now his neck was broad and red patches flared under his pale blue eyes. “The line got the big guys out of the way,” he grinned. “I just ran over the little guys.”

In the locker room, Coach Cooley waited atop a chair with the bloody cross. Ninety-three other crosses decorated the ceiling. This was the shrine; no one else on campus was allowed in. When Cooley held South’s cross up, the boys, some bare chested and stocking footed in their grass-stained pants, bucked and shoved one another to encircle him. “Nail it! Nail it! Nail it! Nail it!”

* * *

The season had started five years earlier, in eighth grade, at the door of the small gym, the boys’ faces soft and scared.

Head Coach Jim Nagel was already like a God. He’d coached Division I at New Mexico State and San Jose State, and would go on to win two national championships, the first as quarterback coach at Division III Linfield College and the second at Southern Oregon University, an NAIA school. “You could tell,” Steinman recalls, “it was just like a bright light came off Nagel. He wanted to come down to the middle school and say, “This is serious, we just won the state championship, and we’re giving you the chance to do something special.’”

That was the buy-in. Conditioning and weight training and film study year round. Straight edge during the season.

Photo: Alexander Black

Third row center in the team photo — a band of seven sober men in white Polos and red Ashland Football caps stand with their hands crossed in front of their waists. At their center is Nagel, broad-shouldered with a Protestant brawler’s face, keen narrow eyes and often a nick on his nose. The 56 players surrounding him are not better than their individual talents because of his college-level offense; they are a powerhouse because of their ultimate faith in his guidance.

Nagel credits his coaching staff over his own growing legend. They were teachers who were present all day, all week, building unity, erasing individualism, there to chaperone the boys in the frosty parking lot outside the weight room at 6:30 a.m., there when the notebooks came out after class bells rang. They ate with their devotees during lunch-hour film study. When Gaston or Curtis was grab-assing in the quad, a coach would whistle, holding a class door open for them. Football, 10 hours a day, six days a week. They rested only on Sunday, while Nagel studied game tapes in his den, a tapestry of The Prayer of St. Francis on the wall in his living room.

Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; Where there is injury, pardon; Where there is doubt, faith; Where there is despair, hope; Where there is darkness, light; Where there is sadness, joy.

At home, the boys were told they could do anything.

“Sky’s the limit,” Nathan Holtey says.

“Not to imply they encouraged greatness,” Kacy Curtis remembers. “They just told us we could do as we pleased.”

The summer before the 1993 season, Steinman’s girlfriend, Katie Brandy, peered through a skylight, mildly disgusted by the drunk boys in the kitchen carving “Ts” into their shoulders with a razor blade. TOGA was an inner circle of the football team, comprised of 10 of the 14 starters, named after John Belushi’s call to party in Animal House. Big Jeremy Reed was crying, his chubby shoulder spilling blood through his hand, as Curtis slapped him hard on the back, hugging him.

Steinman sat shaking his head at the offer to be next. “No fucking way I’d ever do that,” he laughed.

But he could appreciate it. They were smart; Ashland High School had the highest SAT average in the state and among the players were a valedictorian (Steinman) and several National Honor Society members. Preppy kids whose liberal parents were surprised at how preppy they were. Former players like Nathan Gaston introduced them to NWA and Pantera, and when he banged 500 pounds down on the squat rack and flexed his biceps for them and sang, I’m Eazy E / I got bitches galore / You might have bitches / But I got more, they understood that he was also going to Cornell in the fall.

That was the early ’90s: There was something wholesome to growing up in a small town, something they took for granted. So they flipped the bird when pictures were taken, or split two fingers around their tongue. That was definitely wholesome, they agreed, using the word as a kind of private slang, its meaning known only to each other.

The dawn air dragging their hair across their foreheads as they drove hung-over to the weight room next morning was wholesome.

Two-a-days were wholesome.

The vomiting was wholesome.

Opie Heyerman was truly wholesome, swinging her tan legs on the tailgate of linebacker CG Fredrickson’s truck, knowing he would emerge from the locker room smelling of soap, his mouth warm.

Their nicknames were wholesome. The Slanks and the Lards. Monsieur Fur because fullback Kacy Curtis had grown pubic hair before anyone else, and Monsieur Non-Fur because Steinman hadn’t. Boosh, because no matter who grew what when, defensive back, Todd Coffey grew more. Tumbleweed, because CG Fredrickson was short and round and prowled the field low with his arms out making him look even lower. David Boekenoogen and Micah Wolf would soon be The-Name-You-Love-to-Say and The Wolfman, but those would come from sports broadcasters on the local news.

They were part of a team. They were winning. That was wholesome.

Week 6, October 15 Ashland, 36 Crater, 0

By 1993, TOGA’s senior year, Nagel says, “It felt like we’d gotten to a point where we had a pretty big bull’s eye on our back.” Ashland football had reached three of the last four state championship games, winning two. Still, he shrugged off the USA Today poll. “Rankings are based on people’s outside perceptions of how good you are.” The coaching staff knew what the 1993 team lacked: size and depth. They were fielding 10 two-way starters to the three or four of conference rivals South and North Medford and Grants Pass, and a crucial element of their previous success was missing: From 1989 through 1992, Ashland quarterbacks Bert Peterson, Kevin Greene, Chris Chambers and Chad Guthrie (brother of Kansas City Royal pitcher Jeremy Guthrie) succeeded each other one after another as first team All-State. Under Nagel, the Grizzlies were a quarterback-centric team that ran up the score through complicated read progressions that could be changed at the line of scrimmage, designed to dissect you through short passes underneath, or embarrass you long.

“I wasn’t that kind of quarterback,” Steinman admits.

“I was fascinated by the removable pads in our pants,” he says of his first memories of organized football. “Everything about them was weird and exciting. I felt like there was something oddly sexual about them. They had smooth lumps on them, irregular shapes that were supposed to connect to our body parts. I often had a very hard time figuring out which sphere was supposed to fit into which pocket.”

As senior year approached, the game had become no less abstract to him. In the muggy heat of preseason three-a-days he was slow-footed, nervous in the pocket, chopping his feet into the ground. Coaches thought the habit would disappear, but local sportswriters coined him Happy Feet — and later derided him, “Jeremy Steinman will not go down as one of the top quarterbacks in the history of Ashland High football.” He was a porcelain-skinned late bloomer, he had long thin limbs, and when he scrambled with his shoulders hunched forward, he ran tentatively on his toes like a weasel, stopping and starting.

“There was a buzz that got back to me,” he recalls. The rumor during summer conditioning was that his friends were being tried out for his spot. Jeremy stood in the hostile sun not knowing whether to take his helmet off as he watched his center, Nathan Holtey, throw the ball. As wide out Todd Coffey threw the ball. Tight end Jason Robustelli. It was embarrassing; he felt sure the other teams enjoyed thinking Ashland wasn’t certain it had a quarterback who could play.

“But also, I remember thinking: ‘I sorta understand.’ I mean, I felt scared, but the quarterbacks before me were the kinda guys who would throw a long ball to a receiver just because it’s exciting.”

“I never felt confident that I could just drop the ball anywhere on the field.”

There was also history. Ashland always fielded a senior quarterback. And when Jeremy was born, his father Terry, a bush pilot who split time between Ashland and Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, had turned the boy’s hands and feet over in his own, and proclaimed that someday he would be a quarterback.

Now, senior year, those same hands had a rash of white blisters he hid from the coaching staff. He kept them under the table at dinner. A doctor ascribed them to stress, without having been told that Jeremy was also having nightmares about forgetting his helmet or rib protectors, or that he had woken one night to find himself standing in bed, chopping his feet on the mattress.

At his player meeting with Coach Nagel before the first game of the season he tried not to look at the framed photographs of “The Kick” that had won Ashland the 1989 championship, or clippings of Coach Nagel hoisted up on the shoulders of the ‘91 team. He tried to hold the coach’s gaze, straightening his back, nodding when he was spoken to, but he knew he didn’t have the coach’s full confidence. Still, he said what he thought was expected of him. “My goal is to win the state championship,” he said. “And be first team All State.”

A year after the season he would take a leave from college, struggling with acute anxiety.

Week 7, October 22 Ashland vs Grants Pass

11 O’clock News, Channel 12:

ANCHOR CAM JOHNSON: “Unfortunately, due to a lack of interest we have no football to tell you about tonight.” SPORTSCASTER JIM HOBBS: Holy cow — everybody just - CAM JOHNSON: We’re just kidding. JIM HOBBS: Something not to joke about. Homecoming night for Ashland tonight, playing host to undefeated Grants Pass — you would have thought Garth Brooks was there, the size of that crowd.

An hour before the game, Steinman and Curtis jogged out of the narrow tunnel, tentative on their cleats as they stepped over the rope fencing. Everything was heightened on game days. It was like Catholic mass. Bright lights and darkness. They came out to toss the ball, a little self-consciously, their multiple shadows cast on the crisp green field. They squatted and jumped, pulling their knees up to loosen their home reds. The scoreboard twinkled 0-0 but the stands sat empty, awaiting the town.

Throw and catch, throw and catch.

The ritual was for Steinman. He blew in his hands as his best friend jogged the ball back after each toss. Throw and catch. Throw and catch. Ease his nerves. Get him to forget about the strange feel of the sharp dry ball in his blistered hands. Get him to fall into the rhythm of dropping back, chopping his feet, the ball at his chest. Get him used to the sound he made throwing in shoulder pads. To believe in the tight spiral up into the stadium lights.

Throw and catch. Throw and catch.

The cover of the game’s program featured matching photographs of Steinman and Grants Pass quarterback Matt Smith, taken from below so each quarterback posed iconic, the ball tucked to his chest.

“SOC SHOOTOUT,” it read.

“ [Steinman’s] lead us to an undefeated season and hasn’t hurt us. We hope he continues to improve. ” —Jim Nagel

Steinman was trying to get the headline out of his mind during their pregame ritual. Smith was 6’4, 212 pounds. By the end of the season, he would be named Defensive Player of the year in the state of Oregon, and go on to be drafted in the first round by the Kansas City Royals as a pitcher and first baseman. Ashland defensive coordinator Stan Gida, who had played for the San Francisco 49ers, called Smith one of the best high school athletes he’d seen in 20 years.

Meanwhile, in the Daily Tidings that week, Nagel was tepid. “[Steinman’s] lead us to an undefeated season and hasn’t hurt us. We hope he continues to improve.” Steinman and Curtis wound down their ritual. Large wet blisters were appearing on his feet now, so he rocked back and forth in his cleats, getting accustomed to the pain.

Game time came quickly. The visitors’ stands glowed white with Cavemen sweatshirts and white with the gloved hands of the pep band’s conductor, the shiny flutes and wagging trombones sizzling under the lights. Six thousand people loud.

But the shootout the program promised bogged down into a defensive struggle more fitting of the chilly October night. Nobody was getting anything going. Ashland would finish the night with 150 fewer yards than average. But from the start Matt Smith and the Cavemen saw what they would see all night: Grizzly defenders in their backfield.

Coach Gida roved the sideline shouting and clapping players on the helmets as they came off, gassed, pushing them back in for another blitz. Ashland was bringing six on most plays, knocking Smith down, forcing the southpaw to scramble into bad decisions. “We watched the videos,” defensive lineman Michael Douglas said, “and he panicked under pressure.” Smith topped out in Double-A, then played linebacker at Oregon.

Justin Anderson snagged the first of four Grizzly interceptions on the Cavemen 10-yard line, returning it to the 1. One play later, Curtis plunged through to score the first points of the game.

The crowd breathed. If it was going to be a stilted defensive evening, at least they had points on the board.

Above: Kacy Curtis (#44) celebrating with Boekenoogen (#2) after the first touchdown against Grants Pass

In the second quarter Ashland went up 14-0 on a 3-yard swing pass from Steinman to Boekenoogen, which loosened the mood for good. Boekenoogen glided to a halt in front of the student section and gave a smooth little shoulder shake, a hurdy gurdy that sent shivers through his girlfriend, Heather Adams, screaming in the stands.

He wasn’t physically overpowering. He was a Marcus Allen-type of back, deceptive and smooth, high narrow hips, his handsome face the exact diameter as his neck. He even took those signature delicate Allen steps when he slowed in the end zone.

“Well, we gotta block somebody, and we gotta move the ball more than an inch, or we don’t have a chance,” an angry Grants Pass head coach Tom Blanchard spit at the reporter on his way to the halftime locker room. “And we will. It’ll be our second half here.”

But scrambling throughout the second half, desperate, Smith wheeled and threw his fourth and final interception, watching from the ground as Todd Coffey’s cleats kicked up the white chalk lines for a touchdown.

21-6. Game over. Shootout won.

Channel 10 Friday Night Football analyst Joe Brett:

“Jeremy Steinman, a big point coming into this one — this is the third game Steinman has been up against a quarterback supposedly outmatched, well he outplayed Matt Smith tonight quite convincingly — like he did [First- Team All-State, Eric] Jenson and Matt Berry earlier this year.”

Week 8, October 29, Ashland 42 Klamath Union, 6

Coach Nagel gave the team a reprieve Saturday morning for their Homecoming performance. Instead of the sprints that often dogged them even after solid outings, Coach Kitchell jogged them out onto the city streets like a living banner of Ashland football. Their close-cropped hair glistened in the sun and several peeled off their T-shirts and jumped to swat at the low-hanging branches overhead. They trotted down the sidewalk on East Main Street, parting around townswomen who drew their bags up close to their bodies, past the fire station, past the greystoned library. Cars at stoplights didn’t move on green, to let the corps pass. Downtown, the shopkeepers had taped GO GRIZZ! posters to their doors. One even hung in the plate glass window of the gleaming white Marc Antony Hotel, the only building in town over three stories tall.

One of the thrills growing up in Ashland was to park your bicycle against the imperial façade of the hotel, avert your eyes on the elevator from the wealthy out-of-town guests, and get off at the top floor. The window at the end of the dim hallway reverberated with light. Kacy Curtis would lean his forehead against the plate glass, teetering over the street nine stories below.

Their parents were believers. They’d moved their young families to Ashland from somewhere else they hadn’t believed in. In Ashland, their children pedaled around unaccompanied on hand-me-down bikes. They stood naked in the front yards holding hoses while their mothers leaned in the doorway gossiping on new cordless phones. They were starting to understand what wholesome was.

Photo: Thomas Glassman

When Sarah Algermissen, the most beautiful girl in school, shaved her head and started taking college courses as a freshman, they understood she was bored by them. When they stayed in the car at certain friends’ houses, they understood their parents dealt drugs. At others, it meant dad was a cop. When they stole weed from their parents’ dressers and found Polaroids, they understood that some of their parents were sleeping together. And when, at certain people’s dinner tables, they bowed their head, they understood they were Mormon or Catholic, but they didn’t know what that meant for their friendships beyond the playing season.

It was not unheard of in Ashland for a parent-teacher conference to end with the three adults naked in the family hot tub. Just as it was not uncommon to carpool with other families to the Medford Airport and wave miniature American flags as Ronald Reagan spoke into a microphone about his War on Drugs.

Ashland was the place where you “faked it ‘til you made it.” A place where hippies were becoming entrepreneurial. Along with Humbolt and Mendocino counties, Jackson County made up the third point of the Golden Triangle of 1990s marijuana production. In the Pacific Northwest, simultaneously rural, and western, and working class, there was a two-year wait list for season tickets for high school football. That’s what was so Shakespearian about the crowds in the grandstand Friday nights: They were shouting with spittle at the corners of their mouths for a game they had dismissed as coarse and brutal until their sons bought in.

Southern Oregon Conference Championship

Week 9, November 5 Ashland vs North Medford

Medford shared the Rogue Valley floor with Ashland but sat broad and flat and stifling, 13 miles out in the exposed sun. Population 55,000, it was home to the only mall in the area, the massive air-conditioned Rogue Valley Mall, where Ashland players went to visit Foot Locker, and walk backwards in their letterman jackets, watching unfamiliar girls. Medford had two high schools, North and South. And it had Chuck E. Cheese and Chuckwagon Buffet and Fred Meyer, where you could stock up on groceries and generic clothes and firearms and electronics.

Ashland students in line for the restroom during North Medford games glanced at the ambulance that sat on the practice field during games, and studied the out-of-town teenagers hanging around the track in black sweatshirts. They would only look away to see through the bleachers, to a shoving match on the field.

North Medford had entered the state top 10 in October. The dark horse, with a loss to Grants Pass on their record. But by the SOC Championship game the Black Tornado had climbed to No. 7, and Coach Nagel thought they were the best team Ashland would encounter in the state, a wear-you-down team who hadn’t yet come to understand how easily they could wear you down.

Coach Kitchell ushered his Kamikazes, his elite group of hitters and yardage studs and weight-room junkies, into the darkened film room at 7:05 p.m. Ticketholders were already lined up outside the gates when the players returned from the pregame steak dinner in their shirts and ties and fresh hair cuts. “Let’s have a win tonight, boys,” the restaurant owner said to them, raising his glass, “or next year you get chopped liver.” Now the crowd was 8,000 strong, and in the bunker-like locker room some of the players squinted up at the trampling footsteps echoing through the ceiling.

The Kamikazes, in their pristine red home uniforms, took a knee on the concrete and held hands, united by the black wristbands they wore. They bowed their heads.

They heard Kitchell slide a samurai sword from its sheath. It sounded like glass being cut. “It’s a choice to be a champion,” Kitchell intoned. “Everyone walks through their life and wants to be successful. But there’s a choice to be an exceptional person, and that’s what this is about. You’ve made this choice.”

His footsteps passed among them.

“I will fly to the ball,” he said solemnly.

“I will fly to the ball, I will fly to the ball, I will fly to the ball,” the boys repeated.

“I will make my reads.”

“I will make my reads, I will make my reads, I will make my reads.”

“We love and care for each other.”

“We love and care for each other, we love and care for each other, we love and care for each other.”

“Tora’s on three.”

“Tora! Tora! Tora!”

They had two minutes in the locker room. A banner had been brought out onto the field for them to run through, so the crowd was up now. The energy rose to a thrum that the boys tried not to think about. They adjusted the towel they dried their hands on. They closed their lockers. They swallowed ibuprofen in dry mouths.

As they came into the tunnel, they heard:

WHAT ABOUT! WHAT ABOUT! WHAT ABOUT OUR COLOR SHOUT!

The high school boys in the stands pumped their fists:

Red! Red! Red! Red!

And the girls, with their hands on their hips, wiggled their asses back and forth:

White white white white white white white!

Running out of the tunnel everything narrowed through their facemasks. Bill Gabriel, the public announcer, called out in his echo-y barnyard voice, “Your Ash-laaaaaaaaand Grizzlies!”

Steinman lingered in the middle of the pack, jogging out with the sophomores, trying to stay levelheaded.

“That part’s almost more intoxicating than the game. The lights. The pageantry.”

He liked to look up from the bright 50-yard line and see Gabriel in the booth. It was impossible for Steinman to have a relationship with the crowd; he couldn’t even find his parents in it, but he knew his dad’s expectations were up there, he’d flown in from Prudhoe Bay for the game and would fly out that same night. But Gabriel, Jeremy’s pony-tailed social studies teacher, was clear and recognizable, and in some way Gabriel’s singularity made Steinman aware of his own role: warming up for the pleasure of the crowd, the latest leader of Ashland Football.

“Total disregard for my body, Sir!” The special teams clapped out.

Everything went silent before the first soft steps of the kicker, gliding towards the ball -

“We felt that if North ever realized they could just grind us, we’d be in trouble,” Coach Nagel says of the coaching staff’s private concerns. “Our kids believed that when they went out on the field on Friday they were supposed to win. But the coaches — we used to sometimes go back into the office and look at each other, and Kitchell’s line was ‘Smoke and mirrors, Coach. Smoke and mirrors.’”

Steinman threw an interception on a broken screenplay on Ashland’s first series. Nerves, Coach Kitchell assured him on the sidelines — a sequence or two to warm up, we’re at home — even as North Medford scored their first touchdown.

When Kitchell relayed the hand signals to Steinman on the next possession, a rhythm started to develop. Curtis hit a 1-trap through a gaping hole. Curtis again on a 2-base, just over the right guard’s hip for 12 yards, punishing three different defensive backs before being tripped up. From North’s 1-yard line, Curtis wormed his way in for his first of two touchdowns of the half.

Ashland led throughout until two fourth-quarter Black Tornado touchdowns put North up 33-30. The last, a 1-yard cannonball up the middle, made Coach Kitchell turn and look up at Nagel in the press box: North was grinding.

The standing-room-only Ashland crowd bundled in their coats and red stocking caps, glanced at the scoreboard: Ashland ball, 3:24 remaining.

On the first play from scrimmage, Curtis caught a short pass from Steinman out of the backfield for a rambling 26-yard gain.

At the North 23-yard line with 2:04 remaining, Ashland gained 5 yards on a Curtis run. But following a North timeout Steinman was sacked for a 4-yard loss, barely holding onto the football.

The Grizzlies followed the sack with a Curtis 6-yard gain on third down, but Ashland was 3 yards short of the first on the North Medford 16-yard line. Coach Nagel considered bringing in the field goal unit to play for the tie, but opted to go for it. On fourth down Curtis ran for an apparent first down, but the Grizzlies were called for a penalty. The ball was marched back to the Medford 20-yard line, a tough fourth-and-7, only 58 seconds on the clock.

David Boekenoogen’s little brother ran onto the field with water bottles.

The players squeezed streams onto the backs of their heads. They looked as far away as players on television. Their tall silhouettes steamed in the lights, save for the few hoggies who peeled their helmets off and took a knee. Kitchell was out amongst them in his red jacket.

He flipped his headset up to talk with Jeremy. For the play Nagel wanted, Steinman would have to wait in the pocket. He would have to throw high to the outside. He would have to believe in his ability to drop the ball anywhere on the field.

“How do you feel about a 90 Z post/corner?” Kitchell asked.

Today Steinman says, “It was the first question they’d ever asked me. I’d never been asked for input.” But he didn’t have to answer — Kitchell had turned away from the uncertainty in Jeremy’s eyes.

“He’s not comfortable with that,” Kitchell said into his headset.

Steinman’s scared eyes followed his coach’s back. At least he’d been honest.

They would run a 91. A bread and butter play — the most basic of the 5-step drops. Steinman could throw a line drive. A short pass. To a player he could see.

As the coaches jogged off the field, the crowd came to its feet, calling to the boys. Shouting in those bleachers, Ashland was a football town. A last water bottle was tossed towards the sidelines and a boy scampered out to retrieve it. The cheerleaders clapped their pom-poms, shook them fizzing in the lights, and then fell silent.

Fourth-and-7.

Jeremy came under center. The Black Tornado linebackers bounced back and forth in front of him. Todd Coffey, the weakside receiver, had felt sure of the call clapping out of the huddle — they could run a 91 in their sleep. Then, as he jogged to the line, he realized the ball would be thrown to him. He tried to set up, like any other play, blinking at the grass in front of him.

“Quarterback Jeremy Steinman, who seemed to disappear from the Ashland offense on a night when both Boekenoogen and Kacy Curtis rushed for more than 100 yards, made perhaps the biggest play.” - Medford Mail Tribune

“I curled around and threw, but it was tipped,” Steinman says. “By Brian Miller, who was North’s first-team All-State defensive lineman. He tipped it with his big mitten glove, but it’s not a hard tip. He just lifts it a little. All it does is take away a little velocity.”

So the ball hovers fat and wobbling in the lights. Everybody in the stands comes up on their toes, raising their chins.

“And Todd has to come back for it. He catches the ball on his knees and there’s just silence. There’s like 8,000 people in the stadium, and it’s silent. And he looks over — you can watch it on the film — he looks over, and there’s the first down marker at 7 yards [from the line of scrimmage], and he’s at 8 yards — first down.

“Next play,” Steinman says, “the fake I made to Boekenoogen, we do the actual play and he goes 11 yards around end and dives into the safety at the goal line — touchdown! It’s just — Eruption. My sister was on the field. I’m hugging my sister on the field seconds later. It was totally inappropriate behavior on everybody’s part. It was pandemonium.”

State Championships

Rounds 1-3 Ashland 42, Sandy 15 Ashland 28, Beaverton 17 Ashland 42, Pendleton 18

“Monsieur Fur,” Jeremy mused, floating on his back in Justin Anderson’s hot tub, “do you admit there’s something kinda gross about the helmets?”

Kacy turned his mouth down, shrugging. His ear had been stitched closed in the locker room the week before.

“The way some of the little pads inside are square,” Jeremy went on. “And some are tubular, and they’re kinda — lewd?”

Kacy smiled. “I admit.”

This was the banter three games into the playoffs. Jeremy had engineered an undefeated 12-0 record late into November. They were accustomed to seeing themselves on TV now. A bus driver had asked Jeremy for his autograph on the street after they crushed Sandy 42-15 in the first round to give Coach Nagel his 100th career win. They then ousted Beaverton in a foggy, battering game. And Jeremy had his best game of the season against Pendleton, dissecting the Buckaroos from a no-huddle shotgun to go 15-for-20 for 262 yards and two touchdowns. When they were reprimanded for flashing a “T” for TOGA in the end zone, it was a slap on the wrist. “We had become family,” Holtey said of the playoffs.

They’d slept against each other on long bus rides. They’d shared hotel rooms, brushing their teeth in their underwear. They’d lay in the dark admitting that they spent more time in the weight room when Brie Jackson was doing lunges in those little Griz shorts. And they’d laughed one late night gathered in Reed’s hotel room, revealing their secret masturbation practices. One included a Ziploc bag warmed in a microwave, topped off with a pantomime of the player doing it with the warm baggie between the mattress and box spring. Fairly wholesome, they laughed. Boys, in peak physical condition in their socks. Straight edge during the season. Dear with their mothers, who’d begun wearing their sons’ letterman’s jackets. And as dusk came earlier in the evening, and along East Main Street, Christmas lights and gingerbread houses twinkled in shop windows they listened to fewer of their hardcore anthems. They brought pillows to sleepovers and lay on their backs singing along to The Jackson Five’s Christmas album.

“There was a purity to the friendships that made us feel that there was a manifest destiny, a sort of spiritual destiny, about the championship,” Jeremy says. When they learned that leading rusher Kacy Curtis’ wrist had been broken since week two, this became even more true. Doctors would have to re-break it after the season — his mother was proud of his decision to play through it. They held out the unspoken hope that his playing would get him into college. Several players remember looking at his taped wrist as they stood in the locker room waiting to go out onto the field.

“The teams are so dedicated to the year-round training that it takes,” reported Joe Brett on Friday Night Football. “Ashland set the standard when Jim Nagel brought that program up. It’s his 100th win in 11 years — it took the Grizzlies almost 40 years to get their first 100 wins in the school’s history. Ashland has set the standard, North Medford has answered the challenge, Grants Pass is right there too. I know they finished second and third, but North, I think, is the better team right now.”

Oregon State Semifinal

Week 13, December 4 Ashland vs Centennial

Nothing worked in the first half of the semifinal against second-ranked Centennial. It was a day game, which made it feel all the more like a bad practice. Jeremy couldn’t get it out of his mind how similar the game felt to the first game of the season against Eagle Point.

“They both made it clear how little I had to do with the victories or losses of the program,” Jeremy says. “Eagle Point was surreal because I’d never started at quarterback on the varsity team. And everything I did landed in a touchdown. Centennial felt the same way. I did the exact same thing as every game prior, and I ended up landing gently on the carpet each play.”

Ball control, was the word running up and down the Centennial sideline midway through the third quarter. They had taken their opening series of the second half 76 yards on five commanding plays to open up a 20-6 lead. Now they needed a stop. Now they needed to gear down. Control the ball, control the game. Coaches had said all week — Hold Ashland to 25 points and we win.

“The first half was the worst half of football we’ve ever played,” Boekenoogen said into the Channel 10 camera post-game. “The second half was the best.”

The Grizzlies scored on five straight possessions to take a commanding 42-20 lead. Curtis started the rally with a 24-yard touchdown run. Then The-Name-You-Love-to-Say scored on three straight drives. First, on a punishing 2-yard plunge into two defenders, Boek held the ball aloft from the bottom of the pile, knowing they’d tied the score. His next two touchdowns, 4- and 32-yard passes from Steinman, left the Centennial coaches to roll their playbooks up in their hands. They looked up at the bittersweet scoreboard; it had been a great season for the seniors, they’d been undefeated, but Ashland was playing its second string now.

“We’ve been behind before, we’ve been in front before — but the bottom line is, we know how to win.” Coach Nagel smiled into the camera, pleased, in his customary Ashland Football cap and turtleneck and red jacket.

Behind him the Griz roamed, holding their helmets aloft. On to the state championship game for the fourth time in five years.

Oregon State Championship

Week 14, December 11 Ashland vs North Medford

At halftime of the Oregon State Championship game Ashland led 18-7.

“Did we?” Micah Wolf says.

“I couldn’t say,” Boekenoogen says.

“Maybe — that sounds right,” Curtis says.

“I don’t remember.”

Jeremy Steinman’s response: “Eighteen to seven? Wow — you know a lot about this.”

There are so many layers of knowledge to a story that is 20 years old. For example: the players remember being the superior team, quicker, better coached, they had beaten North in their previous meeting; the coaches remember their anxiety that if North ever realized they could simply grind Ashland down, there was little they could do.

Both are correct.

Photo: Thomas Glassman

The week leading up to the championship game the Grizzlies practiced indoors on the cement floor of Ashland’s National Guard Armory. An American flag and a State of Oregon flag hung in the rain out front. Several players were sick, while a handful of others let their mouth guards hang out, their noses stuffed. The coaches marched off the hash marks in long strides, kneeling to tape the yard lines. The University of Oregon Ducks’ Autzen Stadium, where the championship game was scheduled, was turf; they weren’t hitting at this point in the season; practicing in the controlled atmosphere of the armory seemed a good decision.

“Looking back, I don’t know if I’d do it again,” Coach Nagel concedes. On the wall was a framed Army Reservist flag with a Latin inscription that several players found themselves wondering at its translation.

The coaching staff had introduced a new offensive scheme, which brought the Grizzly offense to the line of scrimmage in a Robust formation. They’d never done this. Three backs in the backfield, including tight end, Jason Robustelli.

“ We were sort of looking at each other. It had gotten too complicated. I didn’t know how to make simple plays happen. ” —Jeremy Steinman

When Jeremy came under center, Robustelli went in motion, or Boekenoogen went in motion, and the remaining backs shifted into an I or a single-back formation. Or they ended up in trips, with three wideouts on one side. Or they ran the shotgun. Every play, a new complexity. Less freedom to audible. And the chemistry, as Jeremy calls it, was different as well. Robustelli, who had been strongside all year, was now paired with Coffey on the weakside.

Throughout the season, Boekenoogen was more a slotback, or he ran to the outside. Kacy Curtis was their running game. Now he would block up the middle as The-Name-You-Loved-to-Say plunged in behind him.

“They were things that were pretty foreign to our offense,” Steinman recalls. “There was a play called Arrow with four receivers all doing deep routes, and I didn’t quite have a sense of what was going on. But I’d never been failed by this program.”

The new offensive scheme was also an honor, Jeremy says with some resignation. It was a compliment to him. He was dominant throughout the playoffs. Nine touchdowns in four games. After the filthy Beaverton game, Andy Hauck — the first of Ashland’s heralded quarterbacks, who Steinman idolized in seventh grade — made a beeline for Jeremy in the locker room. Steinman had stayed in the pocket in the fog, and gone to his third receiver to sustain the winning drive. “Hauck came up to me afterwards and said a lot of quarterbacks wouldn’t have been that patient. That it took a lot of guts. And I remember thinking it was a big deal, cause I didn’t know Hauck, but I had watched him as a kid, so it was pretty powerful to have him saying that, about me.”

But in the narrow armory hanger the players felt they couldn’t simulate what would happen on the field. Safety Todd Coffey says he couldn’t back pedal at the snap of the ball. There simply wasn’t room, so he stood in place. The players couldn’t hear one coach from another. Kitchell resorted to holding up a manila folder with the play written on it.

“We were sort of looking at each other,” Steinman says. “It had gotten too complicated. I didn’t know how to make simple plays happen.”

“I’m pulling too fast,” guard Darin Gaston complained to the coaches about one play. “I’m gonna knock the ball out.”

But the coaches clapped them back into formation. Their smiles seemed to forgive the players of their worries. They spent the week doing walk-throughs. Thursday night repeated again and again. Simulating a hand off. Simulating a pitch. When Steinman dropped back in the pocket he emphasized each step, nodding deliberately at each read progression, waiting for the receivers, who jog-walked through their routes. “There’s a speed to the game that we got out of,” Todd Coffey says.

The sense of being outside of time did not change when they departed two days early from school, when they spent three hours on the bus to Eugene staring out the window with their Walkman headphones on, when they wandered through the swirly paisley carpeted hotel hallways, or went in street clothes to have a walk around Autzen Stadium, where a sex scene in Animal House was filmed. Kacy and Darin ran out to midfield to re-enact the tryst, Kacy laying his head on Darin’s chest, batting his eyes up at him, “You know, I’m only 13,” he giggled.

On Ashland’s first series of the championship game, Gaston pulled and knocked the ball out of Steinman’s hands.

Jogging back to the sideline Jeremy blew in his chapped hands to keep warm. It was sleeting, an uncomfortable day for quarterbacks in long sleeve turtlenecks. When the Grizzlies stormed the field through the banner and cheerleaders, the paper had stuck to them in long wet flaps. The pomp of the introductions and coin toss were bleak in the mostly empty stadium, where a large high school crowd looked thin.

“Everything was strange at Autzen,” Jeremy says. “We looked small and slow on the turf.”

Just as the early interception had resulted in a quick North Medford touchdown in the SOC championship game, the fumble did now.

North Medford 7, Ashland 0

It was only the fifth time the Grizzlies had trailed in the season, but there was no rush, no panic. Steinman jogged out from the sideline, fastening his chinstrap.

Cobwebs. Boekenoogen went halfway down in his stance before looking around confused in the new Robust formation. Steinman was flushed from the pocket and missed a wide-open receiver. They ran trips. And Curtis was stuffed at the line of scrimmage.

But Boekenoogen also hit his long stride up the middle for a 12-yard gain.

Steinman connected with Wolf.

Almost too easily, Curtis took a pitch around the left end for a 38-yard touchdown, bouncing around the end zone on one stiff leg and then the other, his arms punched down at his side like a WWF fighter.

Seven plays, 81 yards.

Boekenoogen’s extra point was blocked, North held a 7-6 lead.

Like Ashland, the Black Tornado had new looks for the Grizzly defense. They lined up three wideouts in a ladder formation to one side. They tried a reverse. Ran the option. But Ashland’s defensive core of Michael Douglas, Darin Gaston and CG Fredrickson scorched the running lanes, making solo tackles, or, when North’s Kerry Curtis spun from one tackler, the Grizzlies were there in numbers.

“I see you having one helluva fucking game today, Fredrickson,” Gida had said, walking among the stretching players before the game. “I don’t see anybody over there who can handle you, Douglas.”

“ We knew what they were doing. The O-line was substituting. Two tight ends. They were going to wear us down. ” —Todd Coffey

After Ashland smothered the North running attack deep in their own territory, Ethan Titus put the Grizzlies up 12-7 on a 49-yard punt return. But it was the third touchdown that looked like championship football. Hard-nosed. Ugly. They were struggling with the complications of the new offense — Steinman fumbled from shotgun, and another time, unsure of who to hand off to, he fell to the turf as the Tornado closed in. But they could go back to the fundamentals. To muscle memory, formed over the five years since they faced Coach Nagel in the small gym. Ashland was known for an ever-evolving West Coast offense, but they were, at bottom, a worker team. Worked harder and smarter and longer than any other team in the state.

Each time Steinman and Co. broke from the huddle, the O-line put their black fingerless gloves on the turf intent on forcing their will upon North for 3 or 4 or 5 yards. Curtis up the middle for 4. Boekenoogen for 5. Steinman on a quarterback sneak for the first down. Twice Jeremy went over the top for first downs. And then on the goal line, on a third quarterback sneak, Steinman disappeared from the television cameras — touchdown.

18-7. The three missed point-after conversions nagged at them, but they were in charge.

In the locker room at halftime, Tornado head coach Rod Rumney decided to use double tight ends and run the ball at Ashland.

“We knew what they were doing,” Todd Coffey says. “The O-line was substituting. Two tight ends. They were going to wear us down.”

Up 18-13, Ashland drove into North territory, but Steinman continued to have trouble with pulling linemen, tripping over them as he handed off or pitched the ball. Late in the third, he rolled to his right as the pocket collapsed, stopping to chop his feet, before lobbing a pass that drifted downfield, nose up. The play was Arrow, three long routes that had confused him during the armory practices. But when the play signal had come in from the sideline, he hadn’t been asked how he felt about it.

Four plays later, North took the lead as Kerry Curtis burned the Grizzly defense around the right side, for a 34-yard touchdown. Twelve red and black balloons ascended without much ceremony into the sleety air, but the message was clear: North had taken control.

Trailing 21-18, Ashland rallied, driving to the Medford 4-yard line two plays into the fourth quarter. On fourth-and-2, Nagel opted to go for it.

In the huddle, Kacy Curtis sought out Steinman’s eyes more and more. In the teams’ previous meeting, Curtis rushed for 158 yards and four TDs on 15 carries. He was the leading rusher in the SOC — he would, on this day, average 10 yards per run. But he would only carry the ball eight times. Instead, he would watch for Boekenoogen’s legs to pass from where he contorted himself against some linebacker.

Again, on fourth down, the call went to Boekenoogen. The-Name-You-Love-to-Say took the handoff over an opening on the left side. Smooth like Marcus Allen, he approached the line with his lead hand on Curtis’ back, delicately choosing his spot. He sifted through, gaining the first down, but out of nowhere the ball appeared, bouncing dark brown and free behind the surging white Grizzly line.

It was Boekenoogen’s first fumble of the season.

“It felt like all the things that could have gone wrong during the season were starting to go wrong all at once,” Micah Wolf says.

The Black Tornado were no longer fielding even a single wideout. Starting from their own end zone, they came to the line like a black and red clot. O’Neill came under center. Several of Ashland’s D-line shuffled on their battered hands like primates, shifting into the running lanes. If they could hold North deep in their own half, they could get the ball back. There was 10:35 on the game clock. They trailed by three.

Ashland mustered a stop on the North 47-yard line. Fourth down, the Tornado was 1 yard shy of a first. But they lined up as if to go for it. A man went in motion, O’Neill gave a hard count, and Ashland’s Brett Summers jumped offsides.

It took North Medford 14 plays to cover the 93 yards. Ashland’s D-line was gassed, the running backs were reaching safety Todd Coffey with greater and greater regularity. Douglas’ kneepads flopped as he chased the ball carrier lamely into the end zone.

But defenses open up at the end of games. Their zones sit back, protecting from the big play.

Photo: Thomas Glassman

Nine points in four minutes felt desperate, but Steinman remembers feeling comfortable for the first time in the game. He sprinted out with a classic Ashland play call. A bread and butter play. A fundamentals play.

Standing over center, he surveyed the defensive formation and waved a wideout to reposition himself along the line of scrimmage. From the pocket he found Robustelli for 13 down the left flank.

He handed off to Curtis, who battered and twisted away from one tackler to take on another, work horsing for 17 yards.

He was sacked. But up quickly, the clock running.

Next play, he found Titus for 19 yards.

The chains were moving so the referee stood over Holtey, squatted with the ball.

On the seventh play of the drive Steinman chopped his feet deep in the pocket, showing the patience Andy Hauck had remarked on, going through his read progressions. First receiver, second receiver. He eluded a tackler and finally threw back across the field to a wide-open Todd Coffey on the left sideline for a 22-yard score.

Now the failed point-after conversions loomed large.

Now a missed Robustelli field goal in the third quarter loomed large. “It went right over the top of the goal post,” said Robustelli. “I thought they were going to call it good.” But the goal posts at Autzen Stadium are college-sized, four feet narrower than normal high school goal posts, and Robustelli hadn’t practiced field goals that week in the armory.

Photo: Thomas Glassman “ It went right over the top of the goal post. I thought they were going to call it good. ” —Jason Robustelli

If there was anyone left sitting in the stands, they stood for the onside kick. Twenty-two players lined up within 15 yards of each other to fight for the unreliable bounce of a football. 2:25 remaining. Three-point game. Blood on their knuckles. Their tape twisted and ratty. Their helmets with turf marks. The Hands teams on the field.

But the ball bounced as harmlessly as a soccer ball, swallowed up by the Black Tornado.

“Fly to the Ball!” Coach Gida shouted as his defense took the field one last time. He clapped and stomped after players who pulled their helmets on. “Get a turn over, keep it alive — fly to the ball!”

Everyone was doing the math. If North got a first down, the game was over.

Kerry Curtis on a pitch to the left for 4 yards. But even more important, everyone looked up at the clock, shouting at the referee when it ticked on a second after the tackle.

Second-and-6. O’Neill stood over center watching the clock tick down.

Matt Davis for a tough 2.

“Because they were taking their time between plays, we spent more time in the huddle,” Coffey says. ”I remember watching the clock tick down. Even when it got to 1:30 left and then 1:00 left, I was thinking, ‘We’ll get the ball back, march down the field, and score again to win this game.’ Finally, it got to third down and probably 3 or 4 yards to go.”

Ashland could hold them.

All of Ashland’s D-line sat on their knees like exhausted dogs waiting for the Tornado to come to the line. Defensive backs Ethan Titus and Micah Wolf pinched in on the flanks like extra linebackers.

North went in motion. The D-line twitched and shifted. O’Neill watched the clock, then made another hard call, and Darin Gaston bounced on his fingertips into the neutral zone — a gentle yellow penalty flag lofted in the air.

“I don’t remember the end,” Boekenoogen says now. No one seemed to understand. In the huddle Fredrickson called out the defensive formation, and Coffey called out the down and distance. For some reason North ran a hand off to Curtis. Then, on second down Colin O’Neill took a victory knee and several of the Ashland players were visibly confused. They looked up at the clock. Several returned to a huddle that wasn’t there. The North Medford players took a moment themselves before they raised their arms in disbelief, overtaken by their teammates who streaked onto the field from the sideline.

“This whole time I believed we would get the ball back and score,” Coffey says. “But I looked up at the clock and saw 0:15 or something like that. It was only then that I realized we couldn’t stop the clock, and we would lose.”

Boekenoogen was in the same daze. Holtey. Michael Douglas. They didn’t know where to go on the field. Screaming Tornado players bumped into them, surprised them by stopping to shake hands briefly. But it was as if the Ashland players couldn’t hear. A few clear words pierced their confusion, but the free-for-all overwhelmed them. It felt like the view from the top floor of the Marc Antony Hotel, where beyond the initial exhilaration at the sheer drop the boys sensed life going on below without them as its center. Now the glass was gone.

North Medford’s players stood before the television cameras, talked in to microphones, boasted. “They say they can kick our butt every single week. They go on TV and say they have no respect for us, and they can score on us at will. And they can just eat their words right now.”

A photographer followed Jeremy Reed as he tried to cover his sobs with his black mitten. Todd Coffey kept looking up at the scoreboard. The five players would be named First Team All State. More than double that of any other team in Oregon. Kacy Curtis was voted to the Second Team; blocking for Boekenoogen had cost him. Jeremy Steinman was an Honorable Mention.

Coach Nagel says he doesn’t know if he believes that football creates character, or as is more popular today, if it reveals character. This was the second hardest defeat of his career, he says, behind only his son’s senior postseason loss. Unlike the dozens of relationships he maintains with other former players, he is not in contact with anyone from the 1993 team.

Kacy Curtis would hoist a full keg of Killian’s Red up onto his shoulders that night to carry into a house party. That anger and willfulness was part of his character. But more a part, was his pregame ritual with Jeremy. Alone in the football stadium they’d idolized as kids, tossing the ball back and forth — how much admiration he felt for his best friend as he watched him handle the ball with his blisters.

At that same house party, Nathan Holtey would drink a fifth of Hood River Vodka and sit in a hallway where people stepped over him. Part of the story of his character. But more a part, the following day his family, his three brothers and two sisters, his mother and father, along with four other Ashland families, caravanned up Dead Indian Road to cut down Christmas trees. But on the drive up the exposed eastern slopes they had to stop so Nathan could vomit on the side of the road. He would decide against playing any of the other sports he lettered in that year. Bent over weakly in the ditch. He had devoted so much to this. His father reached up and gently averted the younger boys’ eyes.

“I occasionally dream even now that I forgot my helmet or some other essential piece,” Jeremy says. Twenty-one years later, more a statement about his character than anything else.

He is not dreaming about football. He is not dreaming about loss. He is dreaming about playbooks dog-eared by his bed. About keeping his hands out of sight at the dinner table. About his father who had flown in for the game. About their mothers in letterman jackets. About the Shakespeare flags flapping in the wind along East Main Street, where sometimes you would encounter a deer on a city street and be frightened by how close it would let you get to it.