Saturday in the Park, Sort Of

 For the first time in four years, I found myself spending a Saturday afternoon watching an Elmhurst College football game, the Blue Jays topping the visiting North Park Vikings by a score of 42-10.  Clare’s former boyfriend Chris is the new Elmhurst offensive line coach.  I say “former” because Clare and Chris got engaged last week.  There’s a law on the books somewhere that a future father-in-law has to see his future son-in-law’s first home game as a coach.  Where exactly I don’t know, but it’s there somewhere.

Allow me a quick refresher on the joys of NCAA D-III football—a game takes 2-1/2 hours, not three-plus; the players don’t look to be freaks of nature or chemical enhancement; you can actually hear the coaches address the troops and hear some of the hits, too; you get a sense of the players as young people entering adulthood.  You can see the emotion, the drive and, yes, the heartbreak attached to a game played on a warm September afternoon.

A few of the Elmhurst players knelt during the National Anthem, because they felt the need to express themselves.  From what I could tell, none of the players refrained from singing the fight song after the game, and nobody passed up another tradition—ringing the bell in the northwest corner of the stadium after a home victory.  The young men are kids, too, and sports on very good days can be a bridge between those two stages of life.