BRUISES AND BACKFIELDS IN THE GATHERING DARK

I rode my bike through the accumulating darkness of a crisp October evening, trying to make it home before the sun went completely down, the headlights of the cars glittering like speeding jewels. Up ahead I could see the bright-white glare of the park's field lights, and under their gauzy illumination, dressed in sloppy black practice jerseys and grass-stained pants and shouting in pip-squeaking voices, a congress of Pop Warner-aged local football teams ran, slammed, push-up'd, and wind sprinted their way to the end of practice and hot meals at home.

I stopped to watch because I couldn't help myself. Just seeing those young gawky bodies going through their drills, their shoulder pads balanced precariously on a thin rack of bones, brought back a rush of memories and sensations from other autumn evenings when my parents huddled on the sidelines with other parents waiting for us to finish up so that they could bring us home for the day, full of sweat and the chlorophyll tang of rubbed-in grass.
I don't know if those were good days, but they were memorable and, in their roughshod way, innocent because the kind of football we played at that age, most of us sixth and seventh graders, lacked the puritanical and fierce machismo of high school ball; like the girls in Cyndy Lauper's song, we just wanted to have fun, whether it was tag, flag, two-hand touch, tackle with pads, tackle without.

We'd gather at the field at the end of the dead-end street by Bob Casagrande's house, a rectangle of land neatly sectioned by a swamp on one side and the highway on the other. Two or three or seven or nine footballs would arc through the air as we ran posts and flat-outs, and those guys who fancied themselves princes of the backfield would practice their slashes and jukes on imaginary open-field tacklers.

Then the games would start. Albert, an eighth-grader who attended a Catholic school and was a born stage manager, organized us into teams. Because we all hung around each other all the time, he knew our capacities pretty well, so he'd assign people to the teams, looking for balance and fairness. For some reason we always accepted his authority - perhaps because the games ended up being pretty good, with lots of close calls and vintage maneuvers. Because only a few of us had pads, we opted for two-handed tag - at least at the beginning. But before long, with a mutual agreement brokered by Albert, we graduated to an

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