Now the Black Diamonds are an association with three different levels of teams: flag, peewee and midget. They have cheerleaders. Unlike other teams nearby that charge hundreds of dollars, Jeremy only asks for $10. When kids can’t pay, they still play, and he doesn’t ask for the money because Nick Sr. never would have either.

Most people who play are the children or grandchildren of former Black Diamonds. They still show up to volunteer or coach. Jeremy credits the community with keeping the team alive. That, and the $5,000 Nick sends from Tuscaloosa every year, a faraway son trying to keep alive the hometown dreams of an even more distant father.

Jeremy was just laying carpet for a man who had just moved back to town. He used to play for the Black Diamonds. Although he didn’t have any kids old enough to play, he still wanted to know if he could help.

Last season, there were 13 coaches for three teams, 10 of whom used to play here, 11 or 12 of whom had kids on the team, old men watching the young men they used to be.

Back in the day, only Nick and Willie coached. Parents weren’t allowed on the field.

“Every boy got a coach,” Willie says now at his house, down the road. “He takes his boy out there so he gets to play, he becomes the coach. I don’t like that.”

He doesn’t go to games anymore. When the team went back to the field in the weeks after Nick Sr.’s death, he didn’t.

“I just couldn’t. I guess we were just too close, there were just too many memories and all that kind of stuff.”

They don’t coach the way he used to now anyway. Kerry Marbury led the 1969 Monongah High team to another state championship in the year after Nick and Tommy graduated, before going on to become an standout running back at West Virginia. Years later, he came back home and coached here too.

Sometimes, when Willie still came to watch, Kerry would come up and ask him, “Willie, is that the way we looked, the way they’re doing now?”

“No,” Willie would say.

It’s something Tom echoed too.

“There’s no more get down and get dirty,” he’d say.

The Black Diamonds are long removed from the years of 36- and 39-game winning streaks. Jeremy says last year 37 kids played flag, and only 22 returned to play full-contact peewee. New kids showed up to make up the difference, but parents are worried about concussions these days. Jeremy’s son, J.J., is 9, and he’s not sure if he’ll play next year either. He’s small.

There are storage tubs somewhere with trophies from the dominant teams of the early years. The bus Nick Sr. used to drive around to pick up kids is gone — no one’s sure where — and the slogans he used to write in its interior now exist only in local lore, and on the pieces of paper where he used to write them down. His daughter, Nick’s sister Dene, lives nearby and keeps them in the basement.

They wanted to put some of them on a sign, up on The Hill. There was talk of hanging some of the banners too.

Tom didn’t like that idea.

“I got to thinkin’, you know, what’s on that hill?” he asks. “It's already on that hill. Blood, sweat and tears.”

Jeremy told me sometimes he’d see Tom wandering up here, probably searching in the faded lines and muddied field for the same thing he sees in the tape of that 1968 championship season. It’s something that was in Nick Sr. and all the boys who played for him, and it’s something that’s becoming harder and harder to find.