Half-incinerated goal post pads. Remember that partnership about a decade ago between USA Rugby and the National Guard that gave high school and collegiate teams across the country equipment and jerseys? I still spot the pads at the odd pitch from time to time.

My old club played with those for years, but for the last season or two, they were half blackened and melted. My teammate’s house caught fire. No one was hurt, but the equipment was.

His insurance deemed the house totaled, and when he was paid out, he had a choice. He could raze the scorched remains of his home, as expected, and put the money towards a new house and a mortgage. Or he could put the payout toward rebuilding it from ashes, leaving him with a cheaper house, albeit one of much lesser value than if he’d started anew, but no mortgage.

American rugby finds itself in a similar situation. Bankruptcy is imminent. The rubble is smoldering. Chapter 7 means demolishing the home and starting over, as the United States Rugby Football Union would cease to do business.

Chapter 11 means patching together the remains of a failed organization. World Rugby would extend the equivalent of yet another payday loan, perpetuating the hope for a Hail Mary in the form of one more reorganization. Solvency is just over the next hill. I can see it!

USA Rugby is filing Chapter 11, but as of this publishing, the workout plan still needs approval from creditors and a judge. Both dystopias will prove incredibly trying. Both are rife with unknowns, opportunity and potential pitfalls.

Chapter 7 will look a little more like a scene from ‘This is The End’. A complete vacuum of leadership and governance. Rogue survivors will band together to navigate the anarchy and assume power, like Danny McBride’s leather-clad, skull-helmet-wearing pack of cannibals, submissive Channing Tatum and all.

Chapter 11 probably looks a little more like the early stages of ‘World War Z’. There is still some semblance of rule of law. Failing governments will try and uphold the façade they’ve got it all under control, while the world melts around them and hordes of scared people scurry, certain of imminent doom. Unlike the movie, though, Brad Pitt isn’t on his way to save us.

This column isn’t about which tact to take. I don’t have a say, and neither do you.

(Who is your USA Rugby Congress rep? If you could answer that without a lifeline, a zillion points to you.)

This column isn’t about how we got here, either. That part’s easy.

Like years of publicly simulating the murder of Carole Baskin, threatening her, infringing on her trademark, and the subsequent financial drain made it easy for Joe Exotic to lose his zoo, years of all-strings-attached financial dependence on World Rugby, World Rugby’s arrogance and ignorance, and opportunities being systematically funneled to opportunists made it easy enough for a national governing body to go bankrupt.

What this column is about: the rebuild. It’s about getting back the soul of it all.

The final few scenes of ‘Tiger King’ tell the whole story. Flashbacks to a fresh-faced Joe Maldonado talking, with conviction, about how it was all about the cats. About conservation and preservation. Through the decades, he traded his principles for money and an attempt at fame, making it all about exploitation.

USA Rugby was founded by hardworking grassroots yeomen with altruistic intentions. But through the decades, much changed, as did the organization’s values. It became less about actual growth and more about perceived growth, clout chasing and a tier 1 lifestyle for the executives, top coaches and board members.

We won gold medals in 1920 and 1924. Cal started playing in 1882. But American rugby as we know it, most of our institutions and traditions, were born in the ‘60s, culminating with the inception of the United States Rugby Football Union in 1975.

Why did rugby boom then? The short answer – fun. Legendary Cal head Jack Clark went to Berkeley in the mid-’70s to study and play football. His gridiron teammates got him playing rugby.

“Back in those days someone would tap you on the shoulder when football season was over and say, ‘Come on, time to go play rugby,” Clark said on the ‘Captain’s Code’, Blaine Scully’s new podcast. “There was a bit of a renaissance of American rugby on college campuses in what is kind of the late ‘60s. If you think about that time, it’s a bit counterculture. It might have been that football players were tired of having 12 football coaches with whistles up their six. They gravitated, for whatever reason, to playing rugby in the springtime.”

In an era of global fear, political unrest and extreme societal and cultural change – the civil rights movement, Cuban missile crisis, and the Cold and Vietnam Wars – rugby provided an escape from the serious, from the gravity of everyday life.

“This carnage in underwear has an air of glorious madness. Afterwards, looking like a retreating army, winners and losers lined up for another rugby tradition, a double gauntlet of handshakes in the best tradition of well-played old man,” reported Heywood Hale Broun for CBS News from a match between Palmer and Michigan State in 1974. “The beer was almost instant this time, and the teams, which had obviously developed more than a one-beer thirst, surrounded the barrel like bears around a honey tree.”

When the world found out billionaire shark Mark Cuban was a rugger, it wasn’t because old photos of him perfecting the up-and-under or engineering a rolling maul surfaced. It was because Deadspin unearthed those of elephant walks, raucous parties and vignettes of college rugby in the ‘70s.

Now, two longtime Cuban lieutenants sit in the control room for Major League Rugby – commissioner George Killebrew and Donnie Nelson, owner of the expansion Dallas franchise. Both worked for Cuban’s Dallas Mavericks for decades, and it doesn’t take a doctorate in causation to connect the dots between Cuban falling in love with the fun side of the game decades earlier to his trusted advisers joining the high-performance scrum now.

In the 40-some years since Clark first picked up a rugby ball, he’s claimed 28 national titles and spawned countless All-Americans, Eagles, referees and coaches who would drive the game forward. He was drawn the game by men who were drawn to the game by the promise of fun.

The world is back to a place of global fear, political unrest and extreme societal and cultural change. The world is homogenizing at the same time rugby is in the name of mainstream assimilation. USA Rugby is essentially back to where it was in 1975, organizationally. Perhaps it’s high time we all get back to what resulted in our growth, and set us apart, to begin with – valuing fun.

Valuing fun should not read: sing all the songs, drink all the beer, walk all the elephants, do your Zulu warriors, and reverse time by 50 years. Valuing fun should read: filter every decision through its impact on the player experience.

These days, people have more recreational options for their Tuesday and Thursday evenings and Saturday afternoons than at any other time in human history. We must give them a reason to choose rugby, but first we have to give them a reason to pull out of their phone and leave their house, and that reason has to be fun.

It sounds simple, but we tend to complicate it.

We’re just a few years removed from a committee of old men determining that if the USA were ever going to climb the world rankings, we needed to play more rugby. They averaged how many games the internationals of world powers played annually, and compared it to that of the Eagles, concluding the best course of action was to mandate a minimum number of competitive matches for postseason eligibility.

Makes sense at surface level – more rugby equals better rugby. But how did it play out in practice? My club had a small league, so in order to meet the minimums, we had to start our season earlier than we would have liked, train indoors in winter months, and drive nine hours one-way in what essentially counted as a forced friendly with no bearing on the league standings outside of ticking the box of playoff eligibility.

While there was a modicum of logic behind the decision, it was never filtered through the player experience. Enjoyment wasn’t factored in. Winning was. Symmetry. Likely some self-serving motives were considered, as is tradition in club rugby.

But driving 18 hours in one weekend for a forced friendly isn’t fun, and that either wasn’t considered or given appropriate weight. Too many weekends like that, and you lose players. In effect, USA Rugby mandated clubs provide a less-fun experience to players, or else.

You want to win? You need engaged players. People who are enjoying what they’re doing are more engaged.

Your club needs more players? Guess what, fun and something-greater-to-belong-to are easier to sell and more importantly, deliver, than low barrier to entry to a scholarship or Olympic opportunity or an unsolicited fitness goal or optimal offseason training regimen for football.

You need better commitment from your players? Not only is valuing fun going to attract the player, but if coming to the game on Saturday is fun for the parent or significant other, you’ll see an uptick in participation and commitment.

Need more sponsors, donors, administrators, field liners, bratwurst cookers, touch judges, referees, coaches, PA announcers and scoreboard operators to make the game fun for spectators? Or just a few more people who care about the end result? Make coming to practices, games and socials fun for your alumni.

Rugby isn’t just competing against ball sports for attention anymore. It’s competing with Call of Duty, unboxing videos, toy reviews, Tinder, Barstool Sports, Netflix, daily fantasy football, League of Legends, Settlers of Catan, escape rooms and music festivals.

Rugby isn’t just competing against video games anymore. Now kids would often rather spend their time watching someone else play video games online. No, seriously, this is a thing.

Just getting to carry the ball, kick and tackle isn’t enough of a selling point. Of course, we all believe rugby is objectively the most enjoyable sport to simply play, but that’s no longer sufficient, like it or not.

Manufacturing enjoyment and prioritizing fun looks different for Rookie Rugby than it does for high school. It looks different for a varsity collegiate program than for a student-run, player-coached, unfunded club. It may mean one thing for a D2 senior team in Minnesota and something completely different for a club in Texas in the same division.

Valuing fun doesn’t mean we can’t be serious about our endeavors, either. March Madness is both incredibly fun for all involved and a bastion of high performance devoid of participation medals, and it makes money. So where it makes sense, let’s have our equivalent of that.

You know what else is incredibly fun? Rivalry. Ohio State vs. Michigan. Duke vs. North Carolina. Cal vs. St. Mary’s. Where a national championship doesn’t always make sense, rivalry does. Remember when Cal and St. Mary’s played toward different trophies? That didn’t take any heat out of those derbies.

Not to mention, literally every club in America can achieve rivalry every season. Most of us multiple times a year. You get to schedule rivalry fun, while you hope for playoff fun.

Focusing on local and regional rivalry fun over blocking out several weeks for playoff fun, when building the new calendar for the next era of American rugby, will provide greater value to a greater percentage of the membership. It’s as simple as valuing process over result, the journey over the destination. If we can have both, perfect. But focusing on the result to the detriment of the process is a surefire recipe for misery.

No matter who fills the leadership vacuum, be it the current USA Rugby leadership under Chapter 11, the unknown cast of up-and-comers in USA Rugby 2.0, or the independent organizations which will expand and form in the coming months, they need to prioritize the player experience by making fun a core value.

Most importantly, this time, we the members, players, coaches, fans and stakeholders, have to more diligently force our governors to live by that value. It’s up to us.