Season Finale (Game 9): ¡FUTURISMOS! 8 — Team Ecto-Cooler 2

There are essentially no details in this write up because I couldn’t see anything. I played keeper the entire game and probably 75% of the action took place on the TE-C side of the pitch. I wasn’t wearing my glasses so everything was fuzzy and distant. Sorry. This would have been a good game for detail too. Alas…

Season Dagobah
We, your ¡FUTURISMOS!, entered our third season with something new: expectations. [I’m not referring to the 3-win MDC quota either.] Our first season was our first season and it’s only reason for being was being. The second season was more like Season 1.5 than Season 2 because our roster changed significantly and we missed a season in-between.

Season 3 arrived with no excuses. The team was essentially unchanged, we were sufficiently talented, and we were ready because there was no break between seasons. Our goal for the season probably won’t sound that daunting. We weren’t setting out to topple Dynamo or even make a run at the playoffs. Our goal was to transmogrify from a bunch of people who kick the ball around to a little futbol club.

That probably doesn’t sound that difficult. In a nutshell all we had to do was transcend the sum of our parts. Simply absorb our individual strengths and weaknesses into a collective whole that maximizes the former and obscures the latter.

¿What was in our way?

I don’t know.

I reckon the same thing that’s in everybody’s way.

¿How many transcendent human beings have you met? ¿People that are more than the sum of their strengths AND foibles? I’ve met zero and am aware of only two candidates. Neither is alive so I can’t be sure.

Okay, I lied.

I did know what was in our way. I reckon I knew (and lied) in the same way everybody does.

The only thing retarding our becoming a little futbol club was us. ¿Would we make the necessary collective turn? That’s why I chose the name “Season Dagobah.”

For those unfamiliar with the reference: 1) shame on you; 2) Dagobah is where Luke Skywalker went to find Yoda to train to become a Jedi. One of critical challenges on Dagobah was cave in which one faced one’s greatest fear. In the words of Yoda, in the cave you face “only what you take with you.”

We ventured into the cave of Season Dagobah unprepared for what awaited us in our first game: NÜRD.

The first half of that game nearly scuttled your ¡FUTURISMOS! NÜRD played futbol in a way we’d never seen. Their pace was unrelenting. They seemed to attack and defend with all six field players all the time. They were everywhere. Yes, they had some really good futbolers, but what set them apart was that pace and relentless.

In the cave of Season Dagobah we saw the team we hoped to become. We don’t have as many skilled futbolers as they did but we have a large team of people comfortable playing with each other. There was no reason we couldn’t play at NÜRD’s pace and with their relentlessness. But we didn’t. In that game we also how far we had to go.

Our second and third games of the season were rough: A dreary 0-1 loss followed by a 2-5 drubbing. Heading into the forth game of the season things looked bleak.

Then everything changed.

In game 4 we destroyed the p450’s 10–3. From that point on our record was 4 wins, 1 loss, and 1 draw. The loss was courtesy a dubious goal and the draw was in the face of a semi-professional striker. Just like that we went from a team toiling at the bottom to one that finished just shy of making the playoffs.

¿What happened?

I don’t know.

Time passed. We continued accumulating experiences. We had little triumphs (like a stellar 2nd half against NÜRD) and failures (that listless 0–1 loss). We remained open to the possibility that the reality we were collectively experiencing wasn’t the only one available to us. All of this compressed, Spacetime distorted, and we made the quantum leap from people kicking a ball to a little futbol club.

If you want a cleaner explanation buy some Tony Robbins or read The Secret. But good luck. If there were a better explanation you’d already know it. The more time you spend studying someone else’s map the more lost you’ll become on your own journey.

Sometimes the only way is to walk into a cave, cut a guy’s head off, see that it’s your own, and then come to learn that it was your dad’s. That’s as good an answer as anyone has ever produced.


The Play of the Game and the Defining Moment of our Season
Team Ecto-Cooler is the team we lost 0-1 to in that dreary game after NÜRD. On this night we destroyed them 8-2 and we did so NÜRD fashion. It wasn’t just one person. It was Total Futbol. 6 people forward. 6 people back. Our 8 goals were scored by 5 different people (more below). Mercifully (because I was keeping) TE-C really only had about 6 shots on goal and only four of them were good attempts, such was the swarming nature of our defense.

TE-C weren’t bad either. They clearly knew what they were doing. Nor were they shorthanded. We simply outplayed them and the breaks went our way.

Toward the end of the game we had a corner kick. Sohei rose up to head the ball but a TE-C lady got under him and when he came down his chin landed on the top of her head. The ref called a foul and play stopped. Sohei apologized and then turned up field.

The lady called out to him, “you know, you could slow down now.”

What she meant was, “you know, you’re killing us and this game is out of reach. So please stop playing hard because it isn’t fun for us anymore.”

We, your ¡FUTURISMOS! were playing so hard and so well that we so completely overwhelmed an opponent that they weren’t having fun anymore.

My heart burst with pride at that moment for my club.

Obviously not because we were winning or winning big. That’s not what this is about. It was because we had arrived and we did so without really noticing. [Had I noticed I would have made some sort of effort to slow us down.] Now futbol comes naturally to your ¡FUTURISMOS! We’re not about to topple Dynamo. That’s not the point anyway. We entered Season Dagobah with the potential to be a little futbol club.

And now we are a little futbol club.


Scoring Recap
Bobby–3
TB–2
Sohei–1
Li’l Pete–1
Julia–1 [I loved this goal. She essentially bellied the ball into the goal from point blank range. Big Pete was out and we needed a ridiculous goal. Julia provided. Thank you, Julia.]

Both TE-C goals were scored in the exact same fashion. One in each half. I, the keeper, passed the ball directly to a TE-C person standing roughly 15-feet in front of me right in front of the goal. In both instances the TE-C guy got the ball, took a step or two and ripped the ball past me.

¿Was it embarrassing?

Yes. Yes, it was.


Li’l Pete Award: Sohei
Sohei usually plays forward. As a matter of fact, prior to this game he may have only played forward. Thanks to an odd assortment of gentlemen on hand Sohei ended up playing back a great deal and I, as keeper, was grateful for it.

Time and again just when my level of keeping fear was about to reach the Vomit Point as a TE-C person barreled toward me Sohei swept in to either poke the ball away or simply redirect the play. Often times I didn’t even see him coming. He’d just appear and then everything would be okay.

There was no defining moment where Sohei absorbed some terrible blast. He just seemed to always be there.


Faustian Moment: Crossing the River Styx
Andrew Charon was the only person from work to show up for the game. I think he’s the only person from work to attend a game at all this season and he’d been at C+M less than a week. You may form your own snide comment and place it here.

I’d met Andrew for the first time ever only a couple of days before. Of course no one should judge anyone based on his or her appearance, but I will confess to everyone that when I saw Andrew my first thought was, “I hope that guy plays futbol because I want someone who looks like that on the team.” He looks like he played for Brazil in the ‘70’s: big curly hair and creative facial hair.

As it turned out Andrew does play futbol for Atari Attack and in the CSC no less on Sundays. So I had hopes of adding him to the ¡FUTURISMOS! before I’d even seen him play.

Andrew showed up at the game when I was in the midst of a crisis. For the second straight week a ¡FUTURISMO! betrayed her club by not showing up after she personally swore to me she would after I explained how important she is. I won’t name her but I will say we didn’t have a keeper. Then Elliot didn’t show up but I wasn’t sure whether he was going to. So we really didn’t have a keeper.

This is a crisis. I won’t belabor it but playing keeper is nothing like playing any of the other positions. If you aren’t a keeper, you aren’t a keeper and you don’t want to play keeper. So I sucked it up and volunteered myself.

That meant I was down a guy… ¿or was I?

I asked Andrew if he had is gear with him.

“Yeah, it’s in the car.”

I asked him if he wanted to play.

“¡YEAH!”

He ran to his car and back. As he was slipping on his shin guards I approached him with my jersey. The keeper has to wear a shirt different than the rest of the team so Andrew could wear my jersey. But when I got to him I looked down and I saw the most peculiar thing in his bag.

A bolt of Argentine blue.

I kind of stammered some broken Spanish but Andrew picked up what I wanted to convey.

“Yeah,” he said, “my jersey is the same color as yours.”

If ever the Eternal Blue Sky has personally (that’s not the right word ¿deifically?) intervened in the affairs of mortals it was here.

So Andrew played with us and it was clear he plays futbol. I don’t remember a specific play or anything, but he was out there. Big curly hair, creative facial hair, and Argentine blue jersey all on proud display.

True to his surname, a threshold was crossed that night which Andrew can never return from. Whether he likes it or not, he’s a ¡FUTURISMO! now.

I’m not sure this is technically a Faustian Moment, per se. It’s more like something that was just really fun. I don’t know that this game had clear Faustian Moment and even if it did it probably took place too far away from me to see it so this will suffice.

¿Would Dr. Faust have yelled “¡STOP!” to the nearby Lucifer and traded his soul for any of this? Probably not. But that didn’t make it any less joyous.


Honorable Mentions: Kato-San and Julia
Once again Kato-san saved the day. I invited him last minute because I was worried I wouldn’t be able to play much and he filled in without missing a beat.

Li’l Pete brought a friend of hers, Julia, to bolster the lady side of the ball. I think the best thing I can say is I didn’t notice her. She was instantly a part of the team. And scoring not only a goal but a ridiculous goal in her first ever appearance is nothing to sneeze at.


Fan Roll Call
The people of Sawyer turned it out for the last game. Klair (my dear friend), Dani (her sister and a friend of mine although I don’t know her as well), Nicky (their friend whom I like very much but would be presumptious to label her a “friend”), Spectra (co-person), Alin (my mom), Rachel (my sister), and Matthew (my brother) were all there.

There was a mob on our sideline which makes the other team’s sideline look sad. I know it’s stupid and it’s just a rec league but it means a lot that people show up every now an then. Thank you and to mom especially for bringing orange slices, water, and trail mix.