Flashes of Panic

This is the way conference meets should always end.

The University’s men’s team has been leading most of the day. W, the college whose hat Roger Fox wears in Fox Trot, has won for the last six or seven years, is now in second, and is overtaking fast.

It is the last relay, the distance medley. W is perennially strong in distance races; they’re favored to win. The University has a four-point lead. If they can score less than four points fewer, they win. More than four, they lose. This is The Race.

W is in the lead most of the way. Going in to the last leg, the only team in reach is B. The University, meanwhile, hands off to a kid I don’t recognize—a first-year, as it happens—in fifth, or sixth, or something like that. This is looking like a tall order.

There are eleven teams in the conference; nine of them, including B’s two rivals, suddenly discover that they are passionate fans of B, a fact of which they had been heretofore unaware. B’s anchor sticks tenaciously to the shoulder of W’s. Meanwhile, our freshman, looking like he might go critical at any moment and collapse in a puddle on the track, is picking off other teams one by one. Hey, maybe one more. Maybe one more.

B, despite having more fans than they’ve had in years, is unable to topple the mighty W, who win and score ten points. Nearly every ambulatory person in the area, and possibly a few cows (it was crowded) have packed on to the homestretch of the track, with only two or three lanes left clear for the runners. The University’s freshman comes into the stretch neck and neck with the anchor from the host college. They’re not going to give him the point just to see W go down, and he has to fight for it, so he does. And he does it; the University finishes third.

Scoring six points.

Tie meet.

And that was it for the scoring.

But seeing the rest of the team—the upperclassmen who’d won the 5,000m, swept the top three spots in the high jump, and scraped for points wherever they could find them all day—huddled around their freshman, forty meters past the finish line, hopping up and down chanting his name, because they had a share of the conference title for the first time that anyone could remember, and W had to share the title for the first time that anyone could remember, well, that’s a memory that will last a while.

Technorati Tags: athletics, NESCAC, race, running, track and field