I'm a safety in a long-distance football game between
I thought you were a running back.
No. Common misconception. The other team's been trying to tackle me so long, a lot of people forgot what position I played.
Anyway, it's a long-distance game between Louisville and Charlotte. So the field's about 330 miles long. Not as long as some of those other games, but the Appalachians are right around midfield. And it's just a bear goin' up and down those mountains. Charlotte was whippin' our asses, it was 84-14.
Thing about long-distance games, though, is they come with a ton of paperwork. Rules on top of rules on top of rules. A lot of them are just copied and pasted from other games wholesale, who the hell knows what's in 'em? We were around 20 years into this football game before we really went through the rule books and started looking for something we could use.
It's about as big as an encyclopedia set, but me and the rest of the folks on defense spent months going through 'em. Finally we found one. It must have been a leftover from some old game they forgot to take out. It said, basically, if you get possession of the ball and stay in your own end zone for 10,000 years without being tackled, it's an automatic win for you, game over. And of course, our end zone was defined as the city limits of Louisville.
So one of our cornerbacks, she was like, "if there's somewhere you can hide in Louisville, maybe it's worth trying." And I was like, "well, think of how many searchers Charlotte's gonna be able to recruit over the course of 10,000 years. They'll flip this city upside-down, there'll be thousands of them." And but she was like, "well, it's either that or we're losing this game."
A few weeks later, they're just about to score on us again. They've got the ball at Mt. Washington, so you know, they're knocking on the door. They have this quarterback who can just zip it. Good conditions, he can throw it 700 yards. It's one of the most beautiful thrown footballs I've ever seen with my own two eyes. So he just launches it, but the wideout I'm covering falls in a construction site. All of a sudden, I'm all alone. Easy pick for me, but instead of trying to run it back, I retreat to Louisville, right?
Wow, so ...
Yep, and you can probably fill in the rest. When I was a boy, you know, eight, nine, ten, I used to go back here and play. I was like, "I bet I'm the only person in the world who even remembers that little cave at all." And look at me! I was right.
