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chill pill, Conlan! I just didn’t hear the whistle in time to stop myself.”
    “Right,” Chris said, pushing Jimmy out of the way.
    “This is still tackle football, right?” Jimmy said.
    “Yeah,” Chris said. “And you’re the tackling dummy.”
    Then Mr. Dolan was there with Chris, telling Scott to try to relax, he just got the wind knocked out of him. “Sit up if you can,” he said. “But easy does it.”
    Chris put his hand behind Scott’s back, gently helped him up, took his helmet off, said, “Your face is pretty red. You okay yet?”
    All Scott could do was shake his head.
    He still couldn’t breathe.
    When he finally did get some air back into him, he suddenly started coughing so hard that Chris, not sure what to do, started patting him on the back, as if that would make him stop.
    When he stopped coughing, Scott was at least able to make a joke out of it.
    “Were you trying to burp me?” he said to Chris.
    “Sorry.”
    Mr. Dolan said, “Put your head down for one more second, just to make sure.”
    Scott did. That’s when he realized something.
    He was still holding on to the ball.

SEVEN
    The first official practice, for all the guys who had made it through the evaluations and still wanted to play sixth-grade football, was the next Saturday.
    Scott did his own count, saw that nobody had dropped out after Wednesday. Still twenty-six survivors. After they’d finished, Mr. Dolan called them all together at midfield and told them that playing on his team was going to require almost as serious a commitment to hard work as school did.
    “Hard work and hard hitting,” he said.
    There would be three night practices during the week, he said, and one on Saturday mornings until they started playing games on Saturday.
    The six-game schedule would begin in two weeks, one game against each of the other seven teams in their league.
    Their team would be called the Eagles.
    “I know that doesn’t sound like a lot of games,” Mr. Dolan said when practice was over. “But this is a small town, and we play in a small league.” He was kneeling in front of the whole group, wearing a cap with an O on it that Scott knew was from Ohio State. “This is the first time for me coaching at this level, and I know it’s the first time playing organized football for a lot of you guys. But we’re still out here to win. All I’ve ever been about in football, going back to when I was your age, was winning, and that isn’t going to change now. Starting today, I’m going to do whatever it takes to make this a winning team. Do you all understand that?”
    Some of the guys nodded. Some mumbled, “Yeah.”
    Mr. Dolan suddenly turned into one of those drill sergeants you’d see in a movie, yelling, “I can’t hear you. Is this going to be a winning team?”
    “Yes!” they yelled back at him.
    “See?” Mr. Dolan said. “You’re learning already.”
    “Now there’s one other thing you need to understand,” he continued. “Now that the evaluations are over, the tryouts begin.”
    Scott looked around. Everybody else seemed as confused as he was. Everybody had made such a big deal out of calling the first three nights “evalations.”
    “What that means,” Mr. Dolan said, “is that just because you have a uniform and a number doesn’t guarantee you a spot out on that field. It doesn’t work that way in our league. The only thing I can promise you is that if you’re willing to learn, which means willing to be coached, then you’re going to learn more about football in the next couple of months than you ever thought you could.” He paused then and said, “And that’s just in practice.”
    Mr. Dolan stood up, making a face as he did, then rubbing his right knee hard before he started talking again. Scott had already noticed that he limped a little when he moved around the field.
    “I’ll explain this all to your parents at our meeting,” he said. “But this isn’t one of those football leagues where