Regressed to Fifth Grade
Hissss. Crackle.
The dying fluorescent light let out a death-rattle squeal as it flickered irregularly. With every stutter, the yellowed wallpaper of the semi-basement room rippled like a ghost.
The air inside was heavy. A musty dampness oozed from the mold-blackened walls, mingling with the sour reek of alcohol rising from dozens of empty green soju bottles scattered across the floor. Every breath stabbed deep into his lungs.
In the middle of that garbage-dump of a room, Ma Gang-cheol stared at the old CRT television with vacant, dead eyes.
The commentator’s voice was steeped in grief, yet laced with a strange undercurrent of anger.
Ah, it’s truly heartbreaking. Possession was high, but they never found that decisive finishing blow! There was no clear ace, no problem-solver to put the ball in the net!
Hasn’t this been the same criticism for ten years now? Korea has no “genius” to lead its football. The absence of a crack who can flip a match in the critical moment is just too painful!
“Genius… problem-solver… what a load of bullshit…”
Gang-cheol muttered in a hoarse voice and picked up an empty soju bottle rolling on the floor. Out of habit he tipped it, but not a single drop remained.
His hands trembled violently. Whether from severe alcohol dependence or the throbbing pain in his knees that always flared before rain, he couldn’t tell.
He forced his staggering body upright.
“Ugh…”
A grinding scrape of cartilage came from his knee. The bone-deep, icy agony wrenched a groan from him. Limping, he made his way to the battered cabinet in the corner.
Stained yellow by dust and cigarette smoke, its original gold long gone, a single trophy sat jammed inside—its neck broken and wrapped in tape.
10th National Youth Football Championship
MVP — Ma Gang-cheol
Twenty-five years ago.
Back then, Ma Gang-cheol had been called the “Baby Tiger.”
Once he had the ball, no peer could take it from him. When he shot, goalkeepers could only stand frozen and watch the net ripple. Scouts from every middle and high school in the country wore down the threshold of his house, and the media hailed him as the talent who would carry Korean football’s hundred-year plan.
“Back then… I thought I was the protagonist of the world. I thought kicking a ball was all it took.”
And what was he now?
Far from the dazzling spotlight, a thirty-five-year-old has-been who couldn’t even hold a spot on a K3 League bench and had been released.
The cartilage in both knees was completely worn away. His ankle ligaments hung in tatters; even a short run brought pain like a knife stabbing deep. His bank balance had been in the red for ages, and if he failed to pay next month’s rent he would be kicked out of even this moldy hole.
“If only… if only that damn crosswalk hadn’t been there…”
Bloodshot veins flared in Gang-cheol’s eyes.
The memory he never wanted to recall, yet which returned every night as a nightmare to torment him.
The day he was heading to sign the final contract for Real Madrid’s youth academy.
A bright spring day when he was eleven, on his way to meet the agent of his dreams.
The day he dove into the road to save a strange child and had his legs crushed by a twenty-five-ton truck.
Gang-cheol, you’re a hero. My proud son.
In the hospital his mother had said those words even as she wept tears of blood.
The world praised him too. A righteous boy who sacrificed his brilliant future to save a life at such a young age. He appeared on the news and received commendations.
But the price had been far too cruel.
Nerve damage from compound fractures. Growth plates destroyed. The doctor coldly declared him “unfit for athletic career.”
The genius’s touch never returned. All that remained was not a glorious scar but lifelong regret and grinding poverty.
The praise was brief.
“Ill-fated genius.” “The vanished prospect.”
People boiled over like a pot and then cooled just as fast, forgetting him. Even the family of the child whose life he had risked his own to save stopped contacting him after a few years. Left behind were only the sighs of his parents, bent under the mountain of debt from hospital bills, and his own miserable self dragging a ruined leg.
“Fuck… they said if you live right, blessings come… all bullshit…”
Gang-cheol pulled the last soju bottle from the corner of the fridge and poured it straight down his throat.
Bitter. His throat burned, yet his heart felt even colder and more raw.
Then it hit.
A crushing agony seized his heart as if someone were wringing it in a fist.
“Ghk…!”
The bottle slipped from his hand and shattered on the floor with a sharp crash.
The world spun. He tried to suck in air, but his lungs felt locked solid; nothing entered. Heart attack? Acute alcohol shock?
Collapsed on the floor, Gang-cheol’s fading vision caught his own face reflected in a shard of the broken bottle.
Pathetic. Old, sick, the ugly face of a loser.
Is this… how I die? On the floor of this stinking basement room?
It was too hollow.
Never once wearing a proper professional kit.
Never once being a good son—only driving nails into his parents’ hearts for a lifetime.
And now ending it all in lonely death.
Consciousness dimmed. A cold chill sank all the way to his heart.
In the moment death stood right before him, Gang-cheol regretted it down to his bones.
If there was a god.
If—just if—he were given one more chance.
I will never… never save anyone again.
That empty hero act—never again. Sacrificing everything for someone else like a fool—never again.
I will choose my football, my life, my glory.
Call me selfish, call me trash—I don’t care. I… I wanted to play football so damn badly…
A single hot tear slid from Gang-cheol’s eye and soaked the cold floor.
With that tear, his world sank into eternal darkness.
“Gang-cheol! Get up! The sun’s high—how long are you going to sleep!”
“Uwaaagh!”
Gang-cheol shot upright with a death-rattle scream.
His heart hammered as if it would burst. His whole body was drenched in cold sweat.
He had definitely died. He had felt that horrific pain of his heart stopping, vivid and real.
“Huh…?”
Eyes open, Gang-cheol stared blankly around him.
No musty mold or alcohol stench stabbed his nose. Instead, the soft, sun-dried scent of clean bedding tickled his nostrils.
This was no dim semi-basement that needed lights even in daytime. Blinding morning sunlight poured through the window and stabbed his eyes.
And above all, the sensations were different.
“What… is this?”
He looked down at his hands.
Not the rough hands of a middle-aged man hardened by day labor, covered in calluses, scars, and bulging veins.
White, small, still soft and unformed.
A boy’s clean hands without a single callus on the palms.
With trembling fingers Gang-cheol touched his own face.
No rough stubble. No sunken cheeks from drowning in booze.
Instead he felt plump, smooth skin brimming with life.
As if entranced, he picked up the mirror from the desk beside the bed.
“Huh…”
In the glass, a chubby-cheeked eleven-year-old boy with big round eyes stared back at him in a daze.
His childhood self, existing only in the photo albums of memory.
“A dream? Some life-flashing-before-your-eyes thing before death? It’s way too real…”
To check, he pinched his cheek as hard as he could.
“Ow!”
It hurt. Vividly, sharply. Enough to bring tears to his eyes.
Not a dream. This was brutal reality.
Gang-cheol sprang down from the bed.
The instant his feet hit the floor, a thrill ran through him.
His knees didn’t hurt.
The ankles that always ached before rain, the creaking lower back—everything was light as a lie. It felt as if heavy sandbags had been cut from his body.
He bounced in place. He felt the spring as he pushed off the floor. The healthy, explosive physique he had lost in his previous life and longed for so desperately.
Only then did the scene on the desk come into focus.
Instead of a dusty broken trophy, gleaming gold trophies stood proudly on display.
And right in the center of the desk, a torn-open document envelope.
Real Madrid Youth Academy
— Admission Contract —
Invitation: To Ma Gang-cheol
His heart seemed to drop.
This document. He remembered it.
The one his mother had kept deep in the wardrobe her whole life, shielding it with her body and tears whenever his drunken father tried to tear it up. Proof of the brightest moment of his life.
Gang-cheol slowly turned his head and checked the calendar on the wall.
A date circled in red colored pencil.
May 12, 2013.
“2013…”
His legs nearly gave out.
He had come back.
To the moment right before everything shattered. To the most brilliant—and most terrible—day of destiny.
Gang-cheol lifted the mirror again and stared hard at the childish face reflected there.
The soft, peach-fuzz face of an elementary schooler, housing the soul of a thirty-five-year-old man.
Once the situation fully registered, a hollow laugh burst out of him.
“Ha… so this is life’s second round? Even God has a twisted sense of humor.”
He tugged at the plump cheeks in the mirror and muttered in disbelief.
“I regressed and I’m a fifth-grader. Unbelievable.”