“You’ve still got a few minutes. Re-familiarize yourself with the eight man patterns. Run five men on the line, split your ends, and go to a spread T, two back, one over. This next quarter, I want you to run more outside buttonhooks. Put your receivers into escape positions. Hit them closer to the sidewalks. Lead them back into the side streets. Stay cool. Above all, don’t give up. It’s only fourteen points. We’ve got half a game left. We can win this son of a bitch yet.”

Comes a knock on the locker room door. “Coming up on twelve thirty. Lets play ball.”

T.K. rallies his remaining seven players around him. In a tight knot, they hit the street running.

Harv Matision takes the kickoff and ducks south down Joy Street.

T.K. hand signals his teammates to slice across to Walnut to cut off the long gainer. He heads after Matision to try for the intercept.

He manages to keep Matision in sight, and even to shorten the distance between them when, suddenly, he turns a corner, and Matision is gone. There are no alleys on either side of the street. He’s gone into a building. But which one?

Automatically, T.K. checks the snow banks on either side of the street looking for fresh footprints. The snow is hard packed, almost ice, and tells him nothing.

This is the situation that players dread. Should he wait, hoping to pick up a trace of movement? Or, assuming Matision will stick to ground floors in a bid to gain yardage, set off on a random building to building search?

Factoring in Matision’s hidden advantage, his built-in connection to the control room, T.K. decides to sit tight, banking on his suspicion that IBC, eager for a confrontation between him and Matision, will eventually bring the two of them together. He hunkers down in a doorway, tucks his hands up under his armpits and out of the cold, and waits.

He doesn’t wait long.

A movement catches his eye, an almost imperceptible flicker of motion inside the entrance to the five story Institute of Contemporary Art halfway down the block. T.K. makes directly for the Institute’s door. It’s locked, but made of glass, so he smashes the door in with his fist, opens it and steps inside. The burglar alarm goes off with a wail. T.K. doesn’t care. He knows he’ll never surprise Harv Matision. Not during this game.

In the foyer, T.K. pauses, pressed against the wall. He sees nothing. He moves down a nearby corridor, and stops again. Still nothing. He’s almost ready to move on further when he hears a sound, a slushing counterpoint to the burglar alarm’s wail, a slap on marble. He hears it again. And yet again. Slap, slap, slap, slap, slap. The wet piston sound of a man running.