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you’ve got me coming out of the bull pen to throw to you, which means the way I’ve been throwing to you at school, and the way I’ll be throwing to you all season.”
    â€œYou headed down to Pop Warner too?” Teddy said.
    Then Gus was with them. It was the same as always. All for one.
    â€œWell,” Gus said, “he may have a lousy attitude, but he hasn’t lost his sense of humor.”
    â€œWell, and my mind,” Teddy said.
    This time around he would be the last to go. So he watched Gus catch all five balls Jack threw to him, and Mike O’Keeffe do the same.
    Mike went right before Teddy. As he was running back with the football, Jack jogged over, leaned close to Teddy, and said, “On your last one, when the guy is covering you, I want you to do something for me.”
    â€œWhat?”
    Jack grinned. “Go long,” he said.
    â€œYou want that to be the last thing Coach is going to see today?”
    â€œYup,” Jack said. “Stop. And go long.”
    Teddy told himself to focus all his attention, and all his energy, on Jack; told himself to remember all their sessions behind Walton Middle, all the hours they’d spent together. He told himself to forget Coach and the evaluators and all the other kids watching.
    Just me and Jack , he told himself.
    He pitches, I catch.
    Simple.
    He ran his slant. Jack didn’t baby him, drilling a pass into Teddy’s stomach. Then Teddy ran his next three patterns—curl, post, fly—and caught them all. He was trying to think along with Jack now. Maybe Jack wanted him to go long again because Mike O’Keeffe, guarding him again, wouldn’t be expecting two straight deep throws.
    â€œLast play of the day,” Coach Gilbert called out. “Let’s make ’er a good one.”
    It wasn’t just the last play of the day, it was Teddy’s last chance to impress him, to show him how much game he really had.
    His last chance to show Coach he belonged.
    Teddy knew Mike would try as hard as he could to pick another ball off or knock one down. Maybe in his mind, a stop here might mean he made the team and Teddy didn’t. Maybe it would be all that was separating them when the evaluators and Coach added everything up.
    Teddy would have looked at things exactly the same way if he was the one on defense.
    â€œGo!” Coach yelled.
    Teddy took off down the right sideline, head down, running hard. When he suddenly put the brakes on, Mike jammed up on him, as if sure Jack was going to deliver the ball right there.
    Teddy had him.
    He took a big first step and was in high gear again, like a car going from zero to sixty. In that moment he had three full steps on Mike. It was like he was running free in the outfield at Walton Middle, right behind his own house.
    When he turned around, Teddy saw that Jack had put some air under the ball, more than the throw before. He wanted to give Teddy every chance to run under it.
    Teddy could see it all now: Ball and sky and Mike O’Keeffe, his own head down, trying to get back into the play, to give himself a chance to make a play.
    But Teddy wasn’t watching Mike, he was watching the flight of the ball.
    One that he was sure now that Jack had overthrown.
    It just looked too high and too deep and too far out of his reach.
    Teddy knew he had to be close to the end zone. He just didn’t know how close. He turned almost all the way around, knowing that this wasn’t a ball he could run through. He had to jump for it.
    He jumped, reaching up as high as he could, feeling as if he were starting to fall backward as he did, trying to make his right arm longer than it really was.
    At the last possible moment he put up his big right hand, one of those mitts, like he was trying to touch the sky.
    He didn’t catch the ball cleanly, the way his man Beckham had that time against the Cowboys, what everybody had called the greatest catch of all time.
    But as