Mr. Barlow brought a bag of ice, wrapped in a towel, from the training room. Zimmer seemed content that his tournament was over—he was more than done for the day; he declared he was “definitely done with wrestling.” Matthew Zimmermann lay enraptured in my mom’s lap, where she secured the ice bag against his neck. I could imagine what Zim was imagining: this was how the après skiing would be, the two of them packed in ice, shivering. Elliot and I just looked at each other; we could see that Zim was already shivering, or he was quivering in anticipation of shivering.

“How are the hands—how are your fingers doing?” Elliot asked me, to change the subject. The snowshoer could see I’d taped my right index finger to my middle finger, to keep that index finger from flopping around. When you tear or detach an extensor tendon in a finger, you can’t bend or extend that finger. And the snowshoer knew I’d been putting off the surgery in the palm of my right hand till the end of the wrestling season. The Freshman Easterns was an end-of-the-season tournament for me and my fellow Pittsburgh freshmen.

Elliot also knew that my two teammates and I had come to West Point without a coach; he would be our coach for the two-day tournament. I was unseeded at 130 pounds, as was our Pitt 147-pounder; the seeding committee didn’t think we were potential place winners. I didn’t think we were, either. On the other hand, the Pitt 177-pounder was seeded first—he was a likely finalist. I’d looked over the brackets in my weight class. If I made it through the quarterfinals, I would see the number-two seed in the semifinals—he was a kid from Cornell.

I don’t remember who I beat in my first two matches; in both cases, I got the first takedown and held on to a small lead. In the quarterfinals, I pinned a guy from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. I remember the school he wrestled for because Mr. Barlow was the only one who knew how to spell Rensselaer. My Pitt teammates were impressed by the snowshoer, but they were perplexed by Matthew Zimmermann; I’d introduced them to “my former teammate from boarding school,” as I described Zim. When Zimmer wasn’t at mat-side for my matches, he went back to the bleachers and my mother’s lap.

“You know, that kid from Yale is hanging out with his mom in a kind of unnatural way,” our Pitt 177-pounder pointed out to me.

“Actually, he is hanging out with my mom in an unnatural way,” I explained.

“Is that a boarding-school thing?” our 177-pounder asked me.

“I don’t think so,” I told him. “I think Zimmermann just has an unnatural thing for my mother.”

“It would be more unnatural if he had that kind of thing for his own mother,” our top-seeded 177-pounder assured me.