Seeing Isn’t Believing. Believing Is Seeing.
Last summer I went to my 50th high school reunion.
I caught up with guys I hadn’t stood in the same room with in five decades. The faces had changed. The waistlines had changed. The stories and the camaraderie hadn’t changed one bit.
That weekend, our high school football team — the one I played on as a senior, fifty years earlier — was inducted into the school’s Hall of Fame.
Fair enough, you might think. Except that team took one of the strangest roads to a Hall of Fame plaque you’ll ever hear.
Here’s the record we brought into that season.
As freshmen, we played five games. We wore leather helmets that had been repainted so many times nobody remembered their original color — this was before anyone had studied concussions seriously, though at least we had face masks and mouthpieces. We lost all five games by an average of about 40 points. I believe we scored one touchdown all year. Maybe.
Sophomore year, we got new helmets — sized by trying on the broken-in ones the upper classmen had worn for years. The new helmets that arrived for us had the same size shells but tighter, unbroken-in padding, which meant we left practice most days with dents pressed into our foreheads. We played eight games. We lost every one, though we did manage to score a bit more than the year before.
Junior year we moved up to varsity, playing alongside seniors. We won two games. We got blown out in most of the rest.
Then came senior year — and by any reasonable measure, it should have been our worst season yet. We’d lost our starting quarterback and most of our key players to graduation. The junior class stepping up to fill those spots had struggled through their own losing season the year before. There was no version of the story where the smart money was on us.
Then something happened that had nothing to do with talent.
Our coaches took us away for a week-long football camp before the season started — three practices a day, away from town, everything done together as a team.
When school started back up, a strange conversation began in one of our study halls. We weren’t talking about trying to win a few more games than the year before. We were talking about winning our division. About getting the championship jackets that came with it. A couple of guys actually sat there and sketched out what the jackets would look like.
We had exactly zero statistical reason to be having that conversation. We’d lost 19 of our previous 21 games. But somewhere in that camp, something had shifted, and none of us could have told you exactly what or when.
We won our first two games fairly easily. Then we scratched out a close win over a team that had handled us with ease the year before.
Then we came home to play the division powerhouse — the same team that had beaten us 40-0 the previous year. They were returning almost their entire roster. We were not.
We got the opening kickoff. Three plays later we’d lost about ten yards. On the next snap, our center sailed the ball clean over our punter’s head into our own end zone. Recovered for a safety. We were down 2-0 with barely a minute gone in the game.
In every other year of our football lives, that was the whole story right there — the beginning of the end, exactly like it always went.
This year was different. We believed in ourselves.
The rest of that game was a dogfight. We didn’t score again. Neither did they. Our defense played the game of its life. With the clock running down, our punter dropped a ball down to their 2-yard line. On the very first play from scrimmage after that, we dropped their running back for a safety in his own end zone.
Final score: 2-2.
We went on to finish that season 7-0-1. Division champions. We got our jackets. And fifty years later, that team walked into the school’s Hall of Fame.
We even lost our best running back to a knee injury partway through that season. It didn’t matter. We still believed.
The only thing that was actually different about that team, compared to every losing team that came before it, was belief.
