Comeback Season

The last thing he said to me, "Rock," he said, "sometime, when the team is up against it, and the breaks are beating the boys, tell them to go out there with all they got and win just one for the Gipper." -- Knute RockneAll American THE 2005 SEASON OR Don't Stop Believin' When I was a little girl, I told myself a story about the kind of life I wanted to live someday. I didn't know how to tell a story back then, so I looked around for a blueprint, a story whose plot I could modify for my own purposes. It needed to be about how to live an extraordinary life -- an escape story. So I read lots of books, of course. Pittsburgh's Andrew Carnegie built the public library in my hometown. Even though I haven't set foot in that library in over twenty years, I can tell you exactly where the sports biographies were shelved when I was a kid. My parents thought it was a little strange: their chunky, bookish daughter who really didn't enjoyplayingsports devouring biographies of Satchel Paige, Johnny Bench, Lou Gehrig, and Jackie Robinson. The sports story provided me a straightforward formula, my own version of the Horatio Alger story. Replace "wants to go the distance with Apollo Creed" or "desires to win Olympic gold medal" with "wants to be an author." Replace "must face bias and an unsupportive father" or "fights fear, fatigue, and a Russian adversary" with...well, I don't think I knew who or what I was up against, but I knew it had something to do with being a girl instead of a boy. I knew it had something to do with being from a town in the middle of nowhere Indiana. I knew it had something to do with growing up in a family that rarely read books, let alone thought about writing them. If playing football is a guy's ticket out of "Life in the Steel Mills" or "Life as a Neighborhood Bum," then writing was my ticket out of "Life as a Small-Town Girl." I wanted to take the midnight train and go anywhere. And I did. My story came true. That's wherethisstory begins. I've just moved to Pittsburgh to start my dream job teaching fiction writing at the University of Pittsburgh. My office is in a stately building called the Cathedral of Learning. My first book is out and doing pretty well. I've moved to the Steel City from New Jersey so that I can live closer -- but not too close -- to my family in Indiana. I may be thirty-seven but, as my grandma says, I still have my figure. I have finally achieved my professional goals and am ready to focus on my personal life. If this was a movie, then this would be the part where, after pounding a lot of frozen meat with my fists and running down dirty, narrow streets, I reach the top step of the Philadelphia Art Museum. Triumphantly, I jump around in slow motion, framed by the pink, rising sun. But later, when I'm in the ring and call out "Adrian! Adrian!" nobody answers. The night of the November 28, 2005, regular-season matchup between the Colts and Steelers, I brazenly make a bet with my fiction workshop at the University of Pittsburgh: if the Steelers manage to beat my home-state Colts, I'll give the class extra time to turn in their final exam. There's good-natured razzing all around as we pack up to go home. It's half an hour before kickoff when my bus, the 71C, lets me off in a strangely deserted Shadyside. When I moved to Pittsburgh a few months ago, I got the same advice over and over: the best time to drive anywhere is during game time. Everyone is either packed into Heinz Field (though still waxing nostalgic about Three Rivers Stadium) or holed up in front of a large-screen television. As my bus pulls away, I know that my body is walking down Ellsworth Avenue in Pittsburgh, but the rest of me is back home in Indiana with Colts fans: walking in downtown Indy toward that white, domed spaceship on the horizon; sitting in a sports bar in a big-box shopping center; descending into a finished basement deDay, Cathy is the author of 'Comeback Season', published 2008 under ISBN 9781416557104 and ISBN 1416557105.