Maybe it was the choice to play football in the first place all those years ago that set things in motion. But was that really a choice? Football was my father’s love. It was the way he and I connected, so I loved it, too. Sometimes it’s like that when you’re a kid. You eat up whatever your parents put on your life’s plate.

So let me set the table for you, before I heap on the crazy-ass casserole. It’s Friday, September 8. It’s the first game of the season. I’d come back from summer vacation with a growth spurt, and had hit hell week hard. I was ready. As it was still almost two months before daylight savings kicked in, the game would begin in late-afternoon sun, but would end under the stark halogen lights that could turn the ordinary into a spectacle.

The locker room was all wild energy that the coach had to harness into a “wall and a wedge.” That’s how he wanted us to see it. The Tsunami defense was a wall of water that nothing could get through. The offense was a whitewater wedge, surging through everything in its path.

As soon as I suited up, I went over to Leo. He and I had been best friends for as long as I could remember. We’d been playing football together since we were little kids in the Pop Warner league, where the padding made us so top-heavy we could be tackled by a stiff breeze. Leo was an amazing wide receiver. It was like he had tractor beams in his fingertips that could suck a football out of the sky. He was Black, like about a third of our team. Actually, our team was a good representation of the school demographic. A fair balance between white, Black, and Latinx, with one Asian kid everyone called Kamikaze, even though he was Korean, not Japanese.

I was friends with just about all of them, and we would always give each other good-natured shit.

“If you were any whiter, I could wave you to stop a war,” my friend Mateo Zuñiga once told me, after trying and failing to teach me Spanish pronunciation. Mateo was the best field-goal kicker in the county. He might not have helped my pronunciation, but he did a pretty good job of educating my taste buds, since his mother’s cooking was a religious experience—including the miracle of late-night pozole.

At the time, I thought having a diverse group of friends checked my box of social responsibility. Like there was nothing more for me to do than have some brown at the table. “Color shouldn’t matter” I was always taught—and always believed. But there’s a big difference between “shouldn’t” and “doesn’t.” Privilege is all about not seeing that gap.