This Is It

#. August 12, 2016

#-1. Honolulu CDP, Hawaii

#-2. Leilehua High School

#-3. Football Field

Wa — a name meaning "the gathering place between people." Wahiawa is a town of just over seventeen thousand souls, ringed by two military bases, the kind of place visitors mostly pass through on their way to its golf courses and wineries.

But today, a wave of football power brokers from the mainland had descended on Leilehua High School in the heart of town.

Colleges.

Pros.

No fewer than 178 amateur and professional scouts had boarded flights to Hawaii for one reason alone: to lay eyes on a single boy.

Clemson (South Carolina). Stanford (California). Ohio State (Ohio). And alongside those storied programs, officials from last year's 14–1 NCAA Division 1 champion Alabama stood off to one side of the field, sunglasses on, eyes locked on the turf.

Among them was Nick Saban — widely regarded as the finest head coach in all of college football.

"Big one, aren't you."

That was Nick Saban's first impression of Dwayne Moi Stone.

The kid was bigger than most linebackers.

"Getting a sense of why they've got him classified as a dual-threat?"

"Ha. You could say that."

The one answering was Jacob Hallman, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Alabama's scout — and Saban was clearly pleased with what he saw of the kid's frame.

"Forget the passing. I can't wait to see him run."

"Hardly a stretch, with that body."

"And yet…."

"?"

"Whew — look how many of them showed up."

"Everyone worth their salt is here. Broadcasters, colleges, pros. I've never seen anything like it myself."

Everywhere the two men's gazes landed, the story was the same. Everyone was wearing the same expression — delighted, and expectant all at once.

"Let's hope the boy doesn't disappoint."

"It's his first game, though. Shouldn't we cut him some slack?"

"He needs to show us something that flashes, Jacob. It's not as if we're expecting perfection. He's got four years ahead of him, after all. What we're here to see is what he can build on."

While the two men talked shop, the representatives of the other college programs who'd spotted Saban's arrival stiffened visibly.

Alabama's reign atop NCAA Division 1 owed plenty to Saban's dazzling playbooks — but it was his recruiting genius that truly gleamed.

Even in a year when the quarterback class was considered thin, Saban had battled his way through a vicious competition and snatched Jalen Hurts out of Channelview, Texas.

"Saban came in person?"

"Screw me. What the hell is our head coach even doing?"

"Who'd have guessed the man would fly all the way to Hawaii?"

Just as every eye in the stands had turned toward Saban and Moi, the Kahuku High School players in their red uniforms gathered at one end of the field.

The scouts set recruiting aside for a moment and turned to watch — this was one of those unique rituals you only got to see at a Hawaii football game.

The visitors' bleachers erupted in an instant.

"EKE-!! AKE-!!"

"HI!!!"

"EKE-!! AKE-!!"

"HI!!!"

Football's choice of offense or defense comes down to a coin toss.

The visiting team gets to call heads or tails. Once possession and field position are settled, we open the game with a kickoff.

The defense's 35-yard line. That's where everything begins.

Paang—!

The ball sailed high into the sky — and I watched it all from the head coach's side.

For the record, the kicking duties belong to a specialist. Naturally, we have one too.

Sekope Latu. A junior this year.

The ball flew deep and dropped near the opponent's end zone, and the coach clapped his hands in delight.

"Niiice."

A quick word on why he reacted that way. A kickoff must not sail through the end zone.

It isn't that we'd concede points, exactly. It's just a disadvantage.

If a kicked ball travels out the back of the receiving team's end zone, the offense automatically starts its drive at the 25-yard line.

There are times you can weaponize that rule in reverse, sure — but when you can pin an opponent far deeper than that, you're not about to hand them twenty-five yards for free.

Oh, and while we're at it. One yard is 0.9144 meters. Twenty-five yards works out to roughly 22.86 meters.

Something I'd felt since my past life: I will never understand why anyone abandons a perfectly intuitive system of measurement in favor of yards, ounces, and pounds.

Well. The British colonial influence, I suppose.

Anyway.

Our fine kickoff had just pinned Leilehua a shade under twenty yards from their own end zone.

A few substitutions followed, and the proper defensive unit jogged out. The coach's mouth started moving a mile a minute.

"Their right side is soft. Let's hit them hot from the opening whistle. Blitz. Force them to look right, and Renex crashes in from the left."

Football has two positions tasked with calling plays: on offense, the quarterback — and on defense, the middle linebacker.

Sioele Huamatu took the call from the coach, sprinted onto the field, and immediately began barking orders from the heart of the defense.

For the record — that play call, in plain terms, means going after the quarterback. Most blitzes amount to exactly that.

Leilehua's offensive line was vulnerable on the right, so we'd threaten that side to steal their eyes, then let the outside linebacker loop back around and hammer the quarterback.

Simpler still: a fake to the right, a fist to the left.

The moment their offense snapped the ball, we executed exactly as called — and brought down their quarterback.

We didn't strip the ball, no. But we dragged the point of attack back seven yards.

A colossal defensive win.

Like I said: football is a game of land-grabbing.

From there on, we smothered Leilehua's offense at every turn — and I'll admit it, however reluctantly. Sioele Huamatu is the real deal.

At the Division level, at least.

The way he read and reacted in the space of a heartbeat, the way he conducted the entire defensive unit like an orchestra — genuinely impressive.

When it was all over, Leilehua had advanced no further than their own 28-yard line — a net gain of six yards from where they'd started.

And incredibly, in the last moment they tried a fake punt to scrape out extra yardage, failed to pick up the first down, and handed the ball back over.

Wow.

Gutsy call, that. A fake punt in the opening quarter? Or maybe they just didn't trust their punter? Honestly, the latter felt plausible.

And now — the moment the entire field rotates.

My moment.

"I won't load you up from the start."

"Understood."

"Show me exactly what we practiced."

Oorah.

I answered the coach and jogged onto the field.

It was the first time since the second half of my senior year in my past life. Roughly forty-three years, give or take?

The great roar rolling down from the stands, the peculiar tension coiling across the turf — every hair on my body stood on end.

This is it.

This is the feeling.

Beasts ready to devour me stood across the line, and one careless step would buy me an ocean of physical pain — the kind of pain that, for an ordinary person, a single taste would be trauma for life.

And yet I couldn't keep the smile off my face.

Right, then. From here on, we take the enemy's territory.

The ground they held was 28 yards. Cross it, and you score.

But football makes each single yard brutally hard to take. Sometimes a fate is decided ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠not by yards but by inches.

I hustled across the field and gathered the offense around me — ten men, not counting myself.

The foundation of any offensive set is the 5-1: five linemen and one quarterback. For 99.9% of offensive snaps in football, that arrangement never changes.

So it's the remaining five — everyone but those linemen — where the variation happens, and that variation becomes a team's identity.

The positions that fill those five seats: running back, tight end, and wide receiver.

The running back lines up behind or beside the quarterback, takes the ball on the instant, and runs. Sometimes he fakes the carry to deceive the defense and dives into the line, buying the quarterback precious seconds.

The tight end, put simply, is a chameleon. He does a bit of everything — sometimes joining the line to block, on the quarterback's orders as ever.

We were currently set at 1 (RB) – 2 (TE) – 2 (WR), the team's most basic formation — a lineup, you could say, arranged with me in mind.

"So, Fake Samoan. Nervous?"

"Hey!"

"I'm fine, thank you."

The instant we huddled up, Loto Huamatu came needling me. Cameron bristled at once, but I waved him down. It hadn't scratched me in the slightest.

Instead, I called the play.

"We start with Trap."

"Whoa — isn't that a little too vanilla?"

"Hahahaha."

"Can't have you boys cold. That's why — so you can't pin this on my ankles later, warm up early. And I need a look at what you can do."

Football teams love an arrogant quarterback on the field — because that arrogance reads as confidence. And the moment a quarterback goes soft, the offensive line crumbles with him.

"Their defense has a freshman and a sophomore on the left. Jerome, you pull the trap. Stanett sets up left, and Pua runs right — their left linebacker will vacate when he sees the pull. You following me?"

"Oorah."

"Okay, let's go! Let's tear it down!"

"OORAH!!"

Trap is a foundational offensive play. Of the five offensive linemen, one of the guards flanking the center suddenly pulls across to the opposite side — usually driving into the gap between the enemy center and guard — seizing a momentary numbers advantage, bulldozing a defender out of the lane, and opening a runway for the running back to charge through.

Naturally, that leaves the guard's vacated side exposed — which is why I placed our sturdiest tight end on the left. And on the right, I sent the other tight end out running like a wide receiver, thinning the enemy's defense on that side even further.

The goal of this play wasn't points. It was ground. Clear just the front line, and we'd bank at least five yards. Maybe more.

We set the formation. I took my stance behind Loto.

Leilehua's defensive alignment spread across my vision in a single glance, and the enemy defense shifted in reaction to Pua's position.

After confirming the left linebacker taking a small step back, I spat out the numbers that told everyone the situation.

"45!! 28!!"

The numbers a quarterback calls are a kind of Morse code — they let teammates picture exactly what's in front of us. The ones I'd just called carried the enemy's alignment and the shape of our own movement, all at once.

Then I shouted the start.

"HUT!!"

The moment the ball hit my hands, I pivoted backward. Cameron came sprinting around front, and in the slipstream of that pass-by I handed him the ball — the enemy line split open exactly as drawn, and our running back plunged into the gap.

A moment later—

Thud!

Cameron went down under the tackle, but we'd ripped off 6.5 yards from the original spot of the ball.

The instant the gain was in, I flashed a signal to the bench — a call for substitutions.

The truth was, my head was already packed with dozens of strategies that could march us straight to the end zone. But none of them had been drilled, and unveiling them now would be overreaching.

After all, this was my first time playing football. That's what everyone believed.

So for now I'd ride the team's existing offense and prove I could execute it beautifully — at least until the day the coach truly started listening to me.

Though, honestly? I'd say that day could wait until college. This was high school ball, after all.

If I merely played well enough to make every college program in the country drool over me, my high school football career would be a success.

One tight end came off; a wide receiver came on. This drive, I intended to throw.

While the linemen and tight end held the wall in front of me, we'd use the running back as bait and strike through the wide receivers.

In other words—

"This time we're in shotgun."

"Ooh — going hot right away?"

"We're burning the house down. Your line has to hold like glue. Cam's stepping up with me, so if anything gets through — you're dead to me. Wide receivers, line up weak side. I'll fake the handoff to Cam and turn back your way, so run it exactly like we practiced. I'll put the ball right in your hands in the end zone."

"Whew—"

The shotgun, too, is a formation with more than fifty years of football history behind it. Its precise name is Shotgun Trips; whatever follows that label marks the variation.

The one I chose today was a variation as well. Ordinarily the tight end stays out of pass protection and pushes forward as before, driving the enemy linebackers into retreat — but right now, I wanted to test myself.

Set up this way, the front is sealed for certain. The trade-off is that a linebacker can close on me easily.

Those few seconds before the linebacker arrives. Could I get the pass off in time?

In my past life, it would have been impossible. From the day I enrolled at Columbia, I'd known my talent capped out at a college team's second-string quarterback.

But now—

The experience I'd accumulated as a head coach in my past life. The gifts I'd been born with in this one. And above all, faith in the work I'd been putting in since age five for the sake of becoming a quarterback.

With all of it behind me, I raised my voice.

"50!! 22!!"

"…."

"HUT!!"

Just as before, I spun back and looked to the running back. Cam brushed past me again — but this time, the difference was the fake: a mere suggestion of a handoff. I let him dart through the line, then rotated smoothly around.

And there it was — the weak side laid bare before me.

This was why we'd brought the running back.

Three wide receivers sprinting toward the end zone, and I locked onto the freest one among them.

The route drew itself in my mind — the path my receiver would run to catch the ball — and in the same instant the calculations fell into place. The receiver's speed. The ball's ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠speed. Which arc, how much force, for man and ball to meet. It resolved itself, natural as breathing, and I executed the motion I had repeated hundreds of thousands of times.

The ball left my hand—

and a dull, heavy impact landed on me.

‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠

Thud—!

"Ghhk!"

One realization struck me as I went down. Through middle school, three defenders hanging off me couldn't put me on my back — and now a single tackle had dropped me, helpless.

Well, of course. The linebacker who'd hit me stood 188 centimeters and weighed 121 kilograms. And he covered 30 meters in 4.3 seconds with that body.

By national standards, nothing extraordinary — but take a hit at that size and that speed, and even I wasn't holding up.

It hurt. God, it hurt.

And yet—

'This is it.'

Somehow, I was smiling. I even felt it when I hit the ground.

Then, a moment later—

"---!!!"

"--!!"

A great cheer came rolling toward me.

From which side, though? The home stands? The visitors?

I shoved the tackler off me and pushed myself upright — and there, far downfield, I saw a single figure holding the ball aloft.