It got cold really fast

Getting older sucks. I know the old adage, ‘It’s better than the alternative’.
Welp, yeah.
But I went to a football game Friday night and it was 48 degrees out. That’s not bad. That is still shorts weather. Just ask Josh Wykert who ambled up and down the sideline of the Hounds’ game in shorts. That used to be me just three years ago.
People around town would tease me. “Shorts!?” My rule was I don’t wear pants until it hits 32 degrees unless I was going to some event where shorts were for some stuffy reason unacceptable.
Last night I had to go to my truck at halftime and warm my butt up in the heated seats. I grabbed a pair of gloves out of the console. Then I sat there with the heat on in the passenger seat listening to the Yankees/Dodgers Game 1 before heading back out for the second half.
By the way, if you went to bed early, you missed Freddie Freeman hit a bomb into the right field seats with the bases loaded in the bottom of the 10th inning to give the Dodgers the win. It was BETTER than Kirk Gibson’s heroics in 1988. BETTER! Freeman hit it and just stuck his bat straight up in the air and walked halfway down the first baseline as the blue and white in Dodger Stadium Chavez Ravine went bonkers.
I wanted a warm turkey-and-cheese on a multi-grain sandwich thin, but I waited to watch this bottom of the 10th unfold. After Shohei Otahni flied out down the left foul line on a superb catch that sent the left fielder sprawling over the barrier into the fans, Freeman stepped up and crushed the first pitch towering about 20 runs up in the right field stands.
This week’s piece isn’t about the game, but I have a love/hate relationship with baseball and this was a historic moment. It will be talked about for years. I sent a text to John Bohnenkamp, a huge Dodger fan. We exchanged one text each. We both knew.
I made my sandwich the easy way, in the 1200 mw microwave tucked neatly under the cabinets in my sunflower kitchen. Then sat down to write the football story.
Yeah, I was cold there, but I couldn’t help thinking about this group of seniors who played what is their last Friday night at Richmond Stadium ever. These seniors, unlike almost every other senior (aside from the 0-9 team of 2016), are leaving their final season without a win.
In my gloves, Carhart pullover, and stocking cap I kept thinking of my senior season at West Burlington where we went 2-6, and that sucked. These guys didn’t get a win. In what was the coldest air of the season and under the darkness over Fort Madison High School, these guys locked arms and walked 100 yards together with their head coach as the Demons celebrated in the middle of Jim Youel Field.
Students and remaining fans poured onto the field as they normally do after home games and waited for their friends, boyfriends, brothers, and in some cases parents, to finish post-game so they could hug and console them.
It was cold out there for sure, but there’s something warming in that.
Doherty said that football is a small part of these kids' lives. He’s right.
I’ve covered eight years of this football program through Tony Shiffman and Doherty. I’ve seen the ups and the downs. I’ve lamented the economics that impact teams like Fort Madison competing with the rich I-80 corridor. When the IHSAA factored free and reduced lunch data into enrollment data to determine class structures for football, it was a step in the right direction. There’s still more work to be done and I fear that work is quietly (or not so quietly) being shifted toward regionalized education.
That’s not out of Freeman’s right field. We’re seeing the impact of this migration of education on the field. It very likely is an unstoppable movement and puts programs like Fort Madison’s in a pinch. But Doherty, and Mussleman, and Cullen, and Wykert, and Lamb, and all the others dressed in pink Friday night, push on in the heat of the summer and cold of the crisp fall.
Football cycles. It does. Solid programs mitigate the cycling, but there’s an evolution there in the history of all good programs where they weren’t good. Doherty will say this wasn’t a bad football team, they were a good football team that couldn’t get it figured out. And he’ll blame himself. That’s being a head coach. The buck stops there, but at the end of the day, it’s the cycle in place. There are good young players there to build on and there are probably other good players in the hallways that just don’t suit up.
It's cold now. But there’s too much energy here for this not to be warm again.
Speaking of cold, we’re 10 days away from the election. I would say a halleluiah, but I fear the 10 days will almost be more than I can handle. I want time to slow down, but for these 10 day I’ll sacrifice the speedy passage of time – But that’s Beside the Point.
Chuck Vandenberg is editor and co-owner of Pen City Current. He can be reached at Charles.V@PenCityCurrent.com.