While Mateo and Kamikaze and everyone else in the locker room were whooping themselves into a frenzy, Leo always got quiet before a game. Focusing. “If I’m gonna make it to the end zone, I gotta already be there in my head,” he once told me. But today, I knew there was more to it.

“Ready to make the Wildebeests an endangered species?” I asked him, hoping to get him into the spirit of things. (Yes, we were playing the Wharton Wildebeests—they made the Tsunamis sound good.)

Leo grinned. “They’re already endangered,” he said. “I hear they only breed in captivity.”

It was good to get a smile out of him. I knew this was the first game he was playing since his girlfriend moved to Michigan—which might as well have been Mars. In the weeks before the move, Leo was all about applying to Michigan State, convinced that what the two of them had would stand the test of time. Then she sent him a break-up text. From the plane. That had to be a first, getting dumped from 37,000 feet. A long way to fall.

“She did the right thing,” Leo said after it happened. “Senior year shouldn’t be about waiting for someone you might never see again. And sometimes it’s best to pull the Band-Aid off fast.” Although it seemed to me it was more like a full chest waxing.

I sat down next to him on the bench. “You do know that all the girls in the stands are gonna have their eyes on you now, right?”

“I know it,” he said. “But I’m not there yet. A few more weeks.”

I had to hand it to him. Other guys might rebound into the next pair of open arms, but not Leo. He had his priorities straight.

“Well, then,” I said, “maybe you can deflect some of those eyes in my direction.”

“Will do,” he said, then his grin took on the slightest slant. “Problem is, it’ll only work for the ones who need glasses.”

I laughed, and he laughed harder, and I laughed harder still. That’s the way it was with us. The way I thought it would always be.

The first five minutes of the game were high energy, because we were so excited to be back on the field before cheering spectators. The Wildebeests were a competent but uninspired team. A good team to cut our teeth on in the beginning of the season. No score by the start of the second quarter, but we were confident of the win. Then Layton Vandenboom, our quarterback, made a bad pass that was intercepted. While he beat himself up over it (something he would continue to do for a whole week, whether we won or lost), the defensive squad took the field. That meant me, if you haven’t been paying attention.