SB Nation

Jon Bois | August 18, 2014

The Tim Tebow CFL Chronicles

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Chapter I

2033, LAKELAND, FLORIDA

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I don't have any appointments until 11. In case there are any walk-ins, I keep the office door propped open with an old kicking tee. Yesterday I forgot I'd wedged it in there, and when I tried to shut the door I put a little crack in it. It's not such a big deal, since a lot of folks like a holder when they do the kickoffs. But I don't know where I'd find a new tee these days.

The slow business isn't so bad. I get to write, and I get to paint, even though my paintings look kind of crappy. I'm pretty new at this stuff, and I'm just using the basic paints and paintbrushes I got at the hobby store.

I guess it helps that I'm not trying to make artwork, really. I'm just trying to document. I'm just trying to record all the things I have seen.

I don't know if I'm ever going to show any of this to anybody. It might be just for me. It's not that I'm not proud of what I've done, because I am quite proud. It's not that all these memories don't captivate me. I saw a beautiful game of football, and a beautiful world, that I wish I could share with everyone.

I just don't think anyone would ever believe me.

* * *

NOVEMBER 7th, 2014, TORONTO, ONTARIO

Raghib Ismail. Ambassador for the Toronto Argonauts and retired Argonauts wide receiver. Tim Tebow! Great to see you, sir. Thank you so much for coming up here to meet. I hope this place is all right. They've got some of the best bagged coffee in Toronto.

Tim Tebow. Free agent quarterback, Heisman Trophy winner, and three-year NFL veteran. The pleasure's all mine, Mr. Ismail.

Raghib Ismail. Call me Raghib.

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It's called the Seein' Tower. Even in their grandest achievements, the Canadian people are humble. They build this enormous structure in downtown Toronto that stands 3,200 meters off the ground -- that's about two miles -- and they give it a name like, "The Seein' Tower." The server sees me craning my neck to try to see the top of it through the window.

Server. You know why they call it the Seein' Tower?

Tebow. I guess because you can see a long way from the top of it?

Server. Nope! A lot of folks think that, but it's actually because when you get to the top of it, you can--

--oh. Yeah, I guess you ... you knew already.

He leaves some milk and tops off my coffee and shuffles away, defeated. The milk is in this little plastic bag, it just sits there all lumpy on the table like a melting snowman. The coffee is also in a bag. Canada is a strange place.

Raghib grimaces from across the table.

Ismail. There was no reason to be like that, man.

Raghib Ismail is in dress blues, as is standard practice for Toronto Argonaut personnel in civilian settings.

Ismail. Jeez, look at him.

The server is behind the espresso machine, hands on his hips, staring at the floor. It looks like he's crying.

I have no idea what I did.

Ismail. He just wanted to tell you a fact he thought was neat, and you humiliated him. You've never been to Toronto?

Tebow. No. Is this a Canadian thing?

Ismail. No, no, just a Toronto thing. They're a wonderful people. Resourceful, often ingenious, friendly, but quite sensitive.

So. We've got one game left on the regular-season schedule, and we're acquiring you because we think you can give us the win we need to get over the top and make the playoffs. If we do, we make a run at the Grey Cup. One game at a time, though.

Before you sign this thing, we need to go over some stuff. Canadian football is more or less the same idea as American football, but there are some things about it that'll weird you out. They weirded me out.

I look down at my coffee. It's quite hot, and the bag is starting to melt. Canada is a very strange place.

The Canadian football field is a little bit wider, and the ball feels a little bit different. An offense is given only three downs, which worries me. The rouge is the thing I'm most confused about. If you kick the ball through the end zone, it's called a rouge, and you get one point.

Raghib clicks his pen and slides it over to me and says,

Ismail. Yeah, the rouge is one of the strangest things about the Canadian game. I found out about it when I joined up in '91, and I still don't really get it. But the thing that's really gonna trip you out more than anything? Listen to this. If you score a touchdown, you--

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Raghib's stopped talking. I look up from the paper and he's just staring at me, bug-eyed.

Ismail. How do you do that?

Tebow. What?

Ismail. Like, write with your left hand like that.

Tebow. I mean, the same way you write with your right hand. Just the opposite.

I get this all the time. All the time. Ask any lefty, they have heard it a thousand times.

He takes my pen and grabs a napkin.

Ismail. Hold on, hold on, I gotta try this.

He carefully places the pen in his left palm, then wraps his fingers around it like a tight fist. Eventually, he settles into a more traditional pencil grip, and tries to write his name on the napkin.

Ismail. Look at that. Ha!

His signature is crude, with big, jagged loops.

Ismail. It's like I'm a baby. Ha ha ha. It's like I'm a ... writing baby.

I would never say so to their faces, but the juvenile delight with which right-handers handle things like these is adorable, and a little infectious.

Ismail. Hooo man. Lordy. All right. Tim, we gotta get going. Can you get the tip?

I look through my wallet, and realize I completely forgot to exchange my American dollars at the airport.

Ismail. Oh, no no no. Tips don't work like that here. You gotta do something nice.

Tebow. What?

I've spoken a lot of one-word sentences since I flew into town.

Ismail. Something nice! Do them a favor. Make them a thank-you card. Maybe sing them a song about how much you enjoyed your coffee.

Tebow. Um.

Lots of no-word sentences, too. I look at my coffee; it has melted the plastic and most of it has dripped to the floor. Canada is a very, very strange place.

I lean on the table as I stand up, and it wobbles a little bit. I look underneath, and it has four legs. Perfect. I grab the sides and slowly rotate it a quarter-turn clockwise, and shake it again. The wobble's gone. I would later learn that with that little trick alone, I'd have been able to eat for free in every restaurant in the city.

* * *

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Ismail. Hold on, I gotta make a call.

Raghib walks over to this thing on the sidewalk that looks like a phone booth. Except there's no telephone. There's just this big metal pipe sticking out of the concrete. He shouts into the end of it.

Ismail. YES, I'D LIKE TO CALL THE TORONTO ARGONAUTS OFFICE. THE ADDRESS IS ONE BLUE JAYS WAY.

There's a pause, and a thin, barely-intelligible echo comes out the other end. It sounds like a kid's voice.

Voice. YESSIR! WOULD'S YOU LIKE A DIRECT LINE, SIR?

Ismail. HOW LONG WOULD THAT TAKE?

Voice. SIR, WE'S AT PEAK HOURS. WE'S GOTTA MOVE AROUND SOME PIPES FOR THAT ONE. WAIT'S ABOUT THREE HOURS.

The communications system in Toronto is a joke. The city has recently had to find ways to keep electricity usage to a strict minimum, and this was one of their solutions: to "call" someone in town, you yell into a pipe. The "shouties" -- usually 12 years old or so -- are kind of like operators. You tell them where you want your call to go, and they re-arrange this enormous network of iron pipes throughout the city, such that it connects the two of you.

The sound won't travel all that way, of course, so after about a hundred meters, there's a shoutie who listens to what you're shouting. Then they turn around and repeat it into another pipe, where another shoutie does the same thing, and so on and so forth, until the message is delivered. Trouble is, these kids love to embellish. Maybe you'll tell your spouse you're going to pick up eggs on the way home. By the time the message gets there, you have put three dozen eggs down your pants, you have changed your name to "Fart Idiot," and you want a divorce.

Ismail. THREE HOURS?

I WANT TO MAKE IT CLEAR THAT I AM NOT YELLING BECAUSE I AM ANGRY.

Shoutie. YESSIR. 'PRECIATE THAT, SIR. WE'S COULD SEND IT AS A BROADCAST IF YOU WANT. LOTS QUICKER.

A broadcast transmits a lot faster, because rather than connecting a direct line, the shouties simply yell it through the entire network.

Ismail. ALL RIGHT, DO THAT.

CITY OF TORONTO, THIS IS RAGHIB ISMAIL.

He waits; it looks as though he's waiting for applause. Nothing.

And then I hear cheering. The message bangs from pipe to pipe, neighborhood to neighborhood, and as it does, the roar grows louder. Soon it sounds like the whole city, in each direction, going crazy: "RAG-HIB! RAG-HIB! RAG-HIB!" He looks down and grins while he waits for Toronto to quiet down.

Ismail. THE ARGONAUTS HAVE SIGNED AN AMERICAN QUARTERBACK. PLEASE WELCOME THE NEW FACE OF OUR CITY ...

He puts a hand over the pipe and points to the sky.

Ismail. This is gonna be a riot, Timmy.

A man across the street yells, "TIM RATTAY!" A woman: "KYLE BOLLER!" Soon enough, the city erupts in various chants. From the northwest I hear "KEL-LEN CLE-MENS." From the east, an entire faction of people seems to be chanting, "RY-AN LIND-LEY." An old woman pops out of a fourth-story window, banging a metal pot with a soup ladle. Her shouts are drowned out, but I think I can make out that she's yelling, "DAN ORLOVSKY!"

It takes five more minutes for the city to quiet down again.

Ismail. The streets are gonna be Hell. We gotta haul ass to my car in a second.

And then, back into the pipe:

Ismail. TIM. TEBOW.

It's quiet for the moment.

Tim Tebow, the man who couldn't hack it in the NFL. Tim Tebow, the novelty. Tim Tebow, the man who will, at long last, get a CFL mention printed in a deck of Trivial Pursuit cards. Everyone in America will laugh, and that's fine. Nobody actually pays attention to the CFL down there. If I suck up here, maybe nobody will notice. In a couple years, when I'm running color in an SEC Network booth, I'll chuckle and make a joke about maple syrup, and nobody will ask me about Canada and the CFL again.

I just gotta play. I can only do this for so many years. I gotta play.

The city begins to rumble.

I can't do TV. I sound like Luanne Platter.

Well, now there's some cheering, but ... mostly rustling. They aren't near as loud as they just got for Raghib Ismail. Or even Kyle Boller. I'm fine with this. Maybe they don't really know me. Maybe I can disappear up here for a little while.

Tebow. Well, there you go, man. Maybe I can give 'em something to cheer for once I get on the field.

Ismail. Oh no, man. Tim. There's only one reason they're quiet. They're getting to work.

They're putting up the signs, man.

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I will never disappear.

* * *

We jog over to Raghib's car, he pats his pockets.

Ismail. Ahh ... damn, left my keys. You got any?

I've only been in Toronto a few hours, and I'm already sick of asking questions and being surprised at everything, so I don't hesitate. I just reach in my pocket, pick out the key in my keychain that opens my mailbox back in Florida, and stick it in the door. It opens, and I'm just laughing my ass off. Just dying. Through my fit, I'm kind of half-verbalizing, half-gesturing to Raghib.

Tebow. So every key opens ...

Ismail. Yuppp. Every key in Toronto opens every door in Toronto.

My head's buried in my elbow on the roof of the car. I can't keep it together right now.

Tebow. THEN WHY ARE THERE KEYS???

* * *

The chants of my name have collapsed into a near-deafening, unintelligible din. Raghib is zig-zagging around cheerleaders and marching bands; it's taking him a half-hour to drive a mile.

Ismail. See, I think -- hey, come on!

He punches his steering wheel with the base of his fist, and a digital voice says "THANKS." A shoutie tips his cap and drags a shout-pipe out of the road.

Ismail. I think a lot of Americans, we think of Canada as this sort of pale imitation of the United States. We just assume that we invented football, and they came along later and started playing a knockoff. Tell you what, though, they were inventing football right alongside us. We played that first Rutgers-Princeton game in 1869. A year before that, Canadians were playing football against British officers in Montreal.

Then in the 1870s, Harvard played McGill, that's a college over in Montreal. Now at this point, you couldn't just pick up the ball in American football. But when the American guys saw the Canadian guys practicing, it was kind of a trip. They saw the Canadians just tucking and running all over the place. So the Harvard guys tried it, and they loved it.

The Canadians invented the running game. We learned it from them. And nobody ever talks about that, man -- hey, check that out.

Raghib cranes his neck over the wheel and looks up.

Ismail. All for you, Timmy. This is all you.

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Folks on the street are pulling cords and spilling flower boxes full of confetti out of the skyscrapers.

Ismail. Those confetti boxes? They were there already. A few years ago, we thought we were getting Brodie Croyle. He never showed. It was really sad. Glad we get to use 'em now.

See, we just can't keep our players up here. Get this, alright? There's this lineman at McGill University, his name's Laurent Duvernay-Tardif. Great player. He's gonna be the top overall pick in the CFL Draft this year. But then the Chiefs take him with the 200th pick in the NFL Draft, and he signs with them. A lot of folks up here saw that as a real f-you, especially to take him with the 200th pick. Nice round number. Like, "Our 200th beats your first."

Even after the Chiefs drafted Duvernay-Tardif, the Stampeders spent a top-twenty pick on him in the CFL Draft. I remember reading about it a couple days before getting on the plane, while I was trying to soak up as much CFL knowledge as I could. In particular, I remembered the comments at the bottom.

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He was going to the NFL. They had to know that, right? But here was a Montreal fan congratulating Calgary on a great move, and by all appearances, genuinely meaning it. That's either Christ-like or stupid. I am in flight from those who say they are the same thing.

Ismail. Tim, you're a celebrity up here, but that's not why everyone's excited. You were one of the best college football players of all time. Why do you think you didn't work in the NFL?

Tebow. I just wasn't good enough.

Ismail. I don't think that's true. We don't think so. We think the NFL is built to nitpick and micromanage and legislate guys like you into uselessness. They didn't let Timmy be Timmy.

Tebow. You sound like everybody in Gainesville.

Ismail. I mean it, man. You have autonomy. We do not have a head coach. We don't have any coaches. Up here, we reject the oppressive hierarchies of authority. You will be the quarterback, so you will be the boss, and the only boss. You're calling every play. Are you comfortable with that?

Everyone who grew up a homeschooled kid will probably tell you something different. The most important thing I learned was self-actuation and creation. Mom and Dad, of course, they were there to make sure I was learning and getting stuff done. But I just kinda navigated my way through my own education. I didn't work, I learned, and what I learned was my idea. And right now, I'm thinking on why I sucked out of the NFL, and I'm finally putting the pieces together.

Tebow. Yeah. I am. I think I am. What kind of timeframe do we have here?

Ismail. I don't know. As soon as we get there.

Tebow. What do you mean?

Ismail. C'mon, Timmy, you see all this traffic, right? I'm getting you there as soon as I can.

Tebow. No, I mean, what kind of timeframe until the season starts?

Raghib stares at me. Oh Hell.

Ismail. As soon as we get there. I got your uniform in the back seat. Suit up.

* * *

The Rogers Centre seats 630,000 people. It is taller than many skyscrapers. The Blue Jays and Argonauts sell a fair number of tickets, but they've never packed the house before today.

Dante Hall jogs out to receive the opening kickoff, or at least be present. He drags a folding chair into the end zone, sits down, and opens a book of Sudoku puzzles. Citing Ontario labor laws, the CFL players' union fought for his right to that chair, and he is not shy to exercise that right. He hunches over and works over a puzzle as the kick sails far above his head. Hall has been the Argonauts' kick returner since 2009, and has had the opportunity to field only two kickoffs.

I pass him as I jog on the field.

Tebow. Hey, why do y'all kick off from midfield?

Dante Hall, age 36. Argonauts returner and wide receiver, and nine-year NFL veteran. Pick up that ball and you'll know.

I haven't picked up the ball yet. Of course I haven't picked up the ball yet. I got out of the car, was led straight to the field, and now I'm here. "Another reason we wanted you," Raghib told me, "is that we need a quarterback who can learn on the fly. We don't have any time to ease you into the role." I barely had time to tie my cleats.

I'm in the huddle. I've got a running back, Volquez, who speaks first.

Nereida Volquez, age 29. Argonauts running back and 10-year CFL veteran. Happy to have you, Tim. We all are. I've never seen the place this full. There were so many people who wanted in here that, like, there weren't enough seats for everyone, you know? So seriously, outside, there are people who want to get in, but they can't! It's fuckin' wild. Like, one person is standing out there, and there's another standing behind that person, and then --

Natrone Means, age 42. Argonauts running back and eight-year NFL veteran. A line?

Volquez. Yes! A line. That's exactly what it looks like. Is that an American thing, I guess?

Means. Mhmm.

Means doesn't bat an eye at having to explain this; he has been in Canada for many years, and is well aware of how poorly they understand some things about our country.

Means. Sometimes there'll be a situation where people want to go somewhere, like inside of a building. A restaurant or concert or something. But they can't. Other people don't let them.

Volquez. Why would they build buildings and not let you go into them? I mean, I'm tryin' to understand, and no offense, but that's fuckin' stupid.

Means. Really stupid. It's just a thing in the States. Tim'll tell you.

I'm not listening. I'm staring at the seats, and the lights, and how they go up, and up, and up, and up. There are as many people in this building as there are in Denver.

An Ottawa REDBLACK shouts from across the line.

REDBLACK. Hey folks, just letting you know ... play clock's down to a minute.

There is no playbook. Or if there is, I don't have it. I guess I'll start simple.

Tebow. Mitchell? Is that Freddie Mitchell?

Freddie Mitchell, age 35. Argonauts wide receiver and four-year NFL veteran. You know it, baby.

Tebow. Tell you what, I'll hit you on a hitch if I can. Which of y'all are my other wideouts?

Maryse St-Hilaire, age 20. Argonauts rookie wide receiver. Here.

St-Hilaire can't be taller than 5'5. Hall is 5'8. My word, we're short at wideout. Who built this team?

Tebow. All right ... maybe I'll find y'all in the flats if I need.

I call for the snap from the shotgun. Henderson, he's my center, he calls back to me.

Henderson. Jav out?

Tebow. What?

Means. You gotta call how you want the ball, jav in or jav out.

The crowd breaks into a chant. "JAV! JAV! JAV!" The play clock's down to four.

Tebow. Uh ... jav in?

The crowd is disappointed.

Tebow. Hut!

The ball shoots through my hands and cracks me in the face mask; there's so much juice on it that I'm reeled back. I scoop the ball off the ground. It's heavy. It must weigh four or five pounds. The blitz is just about on me, and I see Freddie has found a little space. My throw is a dead duck; all five pounds of it leave a dent in the ground, three steps away from him.

We huddle up, and Freddie slaps me on the back.

Mitchell. Your first play and you throw it with your wrong hand! Shit cracks me up. I don't know what that was, but you got some balls.

Tebow. I'm left-handed.

Mitchell. Wait, so you just always throw like that?

Tebow. Yep.

Mitchell. No way, man. No fuckin' way.

I just need to hand the ball off, get the Hell out of this series, and try to get some kind of handle on what's going on once I hit the sidelines.

Means. Maaaaan ... I'm 42 years old. You give me more than five carries, I'll pull something. I mean, you're the boss, but second and ten just ain't the spot for that. Better if you give it to Volquez.

In the shotgun again, and this time, it's not gonna knock me on my ass. Here comes the crowd again: "JAV! JAV! JAV!" I forgot to ask what the "jav" is, and I guess I'll find out.

Tebow. JAV OUT!

Henderson. Timmy, I don't think --

Tebow. HUT!

The ball's in the air, halfway to me. This time I'm ready. There's this sound. KA-CHUNK. This time, I catch the ball, but I don't understand what I have caught. I kill a second or two just staring at it.

All right, well, that's why it weighs so much. If I had more than two and a half seconds before the blitz was on me, I might look closer at the telescoping metal tail that has sprung out of the rear end of the ball, and the three fins that neatly pop out at the very end and almost make it look like a cruise missile. I might let it sit in my hand, and feel a surprisingly perfect counterbalance in weight -- it's heavy, yes, but throwing it is like pushing a train across rails. Soon, I will come to love it; it will roll up and down the arc I draw into the sky with my arm.

But right now, I am a stupid man, standing in the middle of a sport he doesn't understand, with a stick in his hand and shit in his pants. Gotta do something, Timmy. The blitz is on me, and I remember that pitching to Volquez was the idea. What happens next is a throw in a strictly technical sense, I guess: one hand at the ball, one hand on the tail, and I just kind of shove it sideways.

Volquez has it in the flat, and then she plants her feet. An Ottawa cornerback has peeled off his assignment to engage her, but the two are just sort of circling each other. Volquez is brandishing the jav-ball (maybe that's what it's called?) like a sword, ball out. Ottawa takes a step he shouldn't. She winds up and smacks him in the side of the helmet, then pulls up and hits him again on the far side of his face mask. She's won some space, and she goes sprinting down the line.

Another REDBLACK has put himself in Volquez's way, and this time, it's scarier. She's still carrying the jav-ball, like Babe Ruth when he hit one over the fence and forgot to drop the bat. Now his feet are flat. He sees an opportunity. Most times, a player running with jav out slows the runner down, makes the runner vulnerable. A defender has a better chance of smacking that ball out.

She's spinning away from him … ohhhhh God, no, she isn't. She's winding this up like a hammer throw. As the spin turns away from the defender, he uses the instant to attack. He isn't fast enough.

She swings back around, and the ball crunches him in the gut. A couple seconds and eight yards later, she's been shoved out of bounds. That poor sucker is the latest of the too-slow men and women of the CFL who thought they might fuck with Nereida Volquez. They usually end up catching their breaths on the ground, not because they've been outrun, but because they just took one to the gut, and were then outrun.

Right now I don't know any of that, and Hall assures me that it's a legal move, both in a "rule book" sort of way and a "nobody's calling the cops" sort of way. In the huddle, Volquez is wincing and looking back at the guy. He's on all fours, and has not bothered to remove his helmet before vomiting through it.

Mitchell. God, you fucked him up, Ne.

Volquez. I mean, I really didn't mean to fuck him up so hard. But it's like he tried me and I had to let him know.

Timmy, see, the folks that been around, we got an understanding. They let me pick up two or three, cut out of bounds, everybody's cool and it's good. He's a rookie, though, and shit, he's gotta know. Plus! It's good for the planet.

Mitchell. What, throw-up? Throw-up ain't good for the planet.

Volquez. Yeah it is. Think about it, it's organic.

Mitchell. That's stupid. You're fuckin' stupid.

Volquez. Fuck you.

Mitchell. We're inside, dumbfuck.

Volquez. Fuck you!

Volquez is setting up to my left; Freddie, who has abandoned an argument about barf that he was probably on his way to winning, lines up way out on the right sideline and pouts. The huddle has broken, no play has been called, and Means puts an arm around my shoulder.

Means. Look at that.

Means. You're the boss here. But you want my advice?

Yes, I do. Right now, if Means tells me to bury the ball at the 20 and plant a touchdown tree, I'll do it.

Means. Third down on our own 28, we'd usually punt. It'd usually be stupid not to. A team usually only gets inside the opponent's 30 a couple times a season. If they get close enough to kick a field goal, we've probably lost.

That's what CFL scores look like. 0-0, 1-1, 2-1, 3-0. 6-0 if a team's really getting its ass kicked. And if we lose, that's maybe our season. You ever looked at CFL standings?

I had, and I just figured their site was messed up.

Means. You ask me, we fake a punt, direct-snap it to you. Fake punts never happen up here, because punting is far and away the most effective way to move the ball upfield. Almost the only way, really.

That ought to mess 'em up long enough for you to tuck and run. You only need two yards. Just find a gap and stretch for it. I'll tell you what. You know how many first downs we had the whole regular season last year? Across 18 games?

We had four. If you get a first down right here, you could walk off the field, fly back to Florida, and never come back here, and it wouldn't matter. You'd be a god. A legend. They'd make statues out of you.

When you know a God, you don't really have any interest in being one, because you've seen what He does every day and it doesn't seem like a lot of fun. But I can run. I'd love to run.

Chris Gardocki lines up to punt, and I line up to his right. The snap. I run in front of him, and this time I make a clean catch. In the following seconds ... hours ... years ... well, I certainly won't change the world. The world will change around me, in spite of me.

I see the sound. I clearly see people in the crowd screaming and drumming and crying. But I can't hear a thing. The CFL end zone is a place that kind of exists outside of time. St-Hilaire will later describe it to me as "steampunk"? Like, there's stuff from the past and the future just kind of mashed together. From the future, I've got this crazy ball, and this stadium that's five times bigger than any building I'd ever heard of.

Lots more from the past, though: behind me is Natrone Means, my running back, who was playing for the Chargers when I was seven.  He's waving his arms and running and yelling something at me. I guess he's celebrating, but I don't really know, because I'm just about deaf for the moment.

The end zone itself is just turf. There's no paint. The field goal post is right at the goal line too, like it was in American football 75 years ago. Todd Peterson, he's our kicker, he'll later tell me that since CFL offenses almost never get past the 40 -- they kind of had to keep the goalposts up there to give kickers a fighting chance at a field goal. That explains the rouge, too. It's hard to get much accuracy at that range. You just bomb it, and if you can kick it out of the end zone, anywhere, that's a point.

On the sideline, a shoutie is hopping on one foot, struggling to rip off one of her boots. She does, and uses it to whale away on a shout-pipe sticking out of the wall, occasionally pausing to scream something into the end of it and point at me. The latter is about as worthwhile as the former; I'm positive that nobody tuning into the pipe can hear anything intelligible.

Sound can't turn my head right now, so it's light that brings my attention to the wall behind the end zone. There's this big display of letters spelled out with vanity light bulbs, and it's lighting up: "BOUND FOR STREET."

Pop, pop, pop. About a quarter of the bulbs bust as soon as they're turned on. Mounted next to it is a big red bell, making the only sound I can really make out. It sounds like one of those jet bridges when they're pulling it away from the airplane. The people sitting behind the end zone are all leaving their seats. Well, no, they're leaving where they were sitting. They're snapping their seats out of the concrete, like they're thieving souvenirs or something. And there's this rumbling in the ground that feels mechanical.

Do you ever wonder what it's like to be an insect? Like a beetle or housefly or something? When people invoke bugs, they usually talk about how tiny and insignificant and killable they are, but the most interesting, and inherently "bug" trait of a bug is its complete freedom from intellect. A bug is allowed to walk around the same places we walk, eat the same stuff we do. If it can fly, it experiences the world in a way we never will.

But it never feels a thing. Even when you flip on the kitchen light at two in the morning and find a little house mouse on the counter, that mouse won't perceive you as some arbitrary body in motion. It'll look up at your face, if it looks at you at all. Those bugs don't know your face from your knee. If you're anything to them, you're a big sack of blood. They're alive, but the type of alive in which nothing is thought about, nothing is feared, nothing is planned. It's a life boiled down to existing and doing. If our lives were boiled down in the same way, they'd probably be about as long as a bug's.

If you want to feel like an insect, I think you get blindsided, focus on what you're feeling and thinking in the tenth of a second that follows, and bottle it up. There aren't any thoughts or words at this point. Indignation is a second or two away. It's like thinking, "huh?" only you don't know what the word for "huh?" is.

I start to turn my shoulders back toward my teammates, but I'm still taking in all this business going on in the seats: where are these people going? I'll ask Nate. I turn my head and there's my bug-moment: a REDBLACK drives his shoulder right into my side, I'm in the sky, I'm on the ground.

I'm furious, but then I'm confused, because when we get to our feet, he's putting his palms up. I still can't hear, really, but he's doing a lot of "I'm just doing my job" gesturing. Maybe late hits are allowed in the CFL? Maybe you're supposed to hit late? Maybe I have to do something in the end zone once I've --

I

It

My teammates jog up to the goal line as though it's the line of scrimmage, because it is.  The scoreboard reads

ARGOS ARE FIRST TEAM TO GO BOUND-FOR-STREET SINCE THE 1985 SEASON.

and

UNDER CFL RULES, THE PLAY CLOCK WILL BE SET TO FIVE MINUTES TO PREPARE FOR BOUND-FOR-STREET PLAY.

and the fans, who moments ago had abandoned their seats behind the goal line, are spilling out into the streets, sitting in the seats they had taken with them.

Raghib shoves through the crowd on the sideline and runs to me.

Ismail. Timmy. Damn it, Tim, I didn't think you'd do this so soon.

Tebow. I can't hear anything. I can't hear you.

Ismail. I'LL SPEAK UP AND SPEAK SLOW. FIRST THING. FIND SOME NEW SHOES. YOU DON'T WANNA BE RUNNING ON ASPHALT WITH SPIKES. IT'S HELL. SECOND THING, YOU NEED TO DRIVE IN THE SAME DIRECTION YOU WERE. NORTH-NORTHEAST.

Tebow. For how long?

Ismail. I DON'T KNOW. MAYBE I SEE YOU BACK HERE IN TWO MINUTES, MAYBE TWO WEEKS.

Tebow. So this is street football or something?

Ismail. KIND OF. EVERYTHING IS INBOUNDS. EVERYTHING IS IN PLAY. FIRST DOWNS STILL WORK THE SAME, YOU NEED 10 YARDS IN THREE DOWNS. IF YOU TURN THE BALL OVER, OTTAWA'S GONNA TRY TO DRIVE BACK INTO THE STADIUM.

So when does it stop? We're interrupted here, and it's just as well. I'm lost. I'll ignore anything else he might tell me, because I could spend a month chewing on what he just said.

I was raised in America, a land obsessed with measuring things up and scheduling their deaths. Games, term lengths, relationships, TV shows, leases, parking. A decade later, I'll still struggle to understand the alternative: that an end doesn't necessarily have to matter, or be worried about, or even exist.

The man who interrupts us is strikingly little and stout; the buttons on his suit look about a hiccup away from popping out. He has a voice that I can't hear, but is probably soft and squeaky. He's reading sheepishly from a crumpled little sheet of paper. He hiccups, and one of his buttons pops out.

He seems to end his remarks, none of which I heard, with a slight lean forward on his tiptoes and a glance at the ground. His eyes are wet. He offers me the sheet he was reading from with two cupped hands and waddles away. One night soon, trapped in an attic and at the end of my rope, I will remember it's in my pocket, and at last I will read it.

Means tells me that's a mayor.

Means. No, not the mayor. A mayor. Here, we've got what you call a popularchy. Anyone who really wants to be in charge can be in charge. If you don't like a bill, you can just walk into City Hall and repeal it, doesn't matter who you are.

It's usually the spiritually small people, the little thinkers, who bother to flaunt authority like that. We all know that one, though. Two sashes. He's trying too hard.

* * *

The line of scrimmage sits right along the "ARGONAUTS" paint in the end zone. Ahead of us are the REDBLACKS; their faces are obscured by the sunlight pouring over their shoulders. Behind them are sidewalks, streets, hot dog vendors, skyscrapers, suburban backyards with trampolines, rivers, mountains, abandoned barns, and permafrost, all part of the field. The hash marks live only in our hearts.

Football was born in a little rectangular box. First there were markers, then paint, then stadium walls to trap it within its bars. And now the beast has been let out of the zoo. It has never been out in the wild, but it knows this place, because this was always the world it was meant to live in.

I line up behind center and ready myself for the great adventure of my life.

Wait, I have one more question.

Tebow. Where's the end zone?

Means. You're standing on it.

Tebow. No, but, like, where do we score?

Means. We don't.

Tebow. Then what do we do?

Means. We whoop their asses, is what we do.

* * *

Music: "El Club De Los Cuerpos" by Bill Elm & Woody Jackson
Chapter Two →

Chapter II

10:03 a.m. First and 10. Ball on BFS (Bound for street) 1.

Payless sales representative. No, no, sit down. This isn't a library. As a Payless sales representative, I'm committed to finding the footwear solution that is right for you. You're an eleven and a half?

Tebow. Yes, ma'am.

I'm not running on asphalt in my spikes anymore. It hurts like Hell. I had to find a shoe store.

I take a seat behind a shelf, ball on my lap. The chair across from me has a little mirror below the seat, and I'm using it to look out the window. I haven't seen any Toronto blockers or Ottawa defenders yet, which makes plenty of sense, because I'm a few hundred yards off course. Once I got a couple football fields away from the Rogers Centre, a shoutie flagged me down.

Shoutie. Mr. Tebow! I's got a message from one Mr. Means, he's sayin' you ought's find a shoey at the cross o' Wellington an' Windsor!

Tebow. Was that a broadcast?

Shoutie. No, Mr. Tebow, only jus' to me. Take a lefty on Front, then a righty on Windsor, find y'to a shoey!

A lot of those folks who had snapped their seats out of the Rogers Centre were parked on Simcoe Street. They'd promised not to give me away, so I slipped through the crowd and made my way here. The Payless sales representative walks out of the back room with a few boxes.

Payless sales representative. OK! I've got some Blair Witch Project sandals in your size, but those are no good for football. I've also got some Threat Matrix loafers, Boston Public running shoes, and Hitch hi-tops.

I take a look at the running shoes, and she puts a hand on my wrist.

Payless sales representative. I have a question. Have. You. Seen. Boston. Public.

Tebow. Yeah, I think so. Once or twice.

Payless sales representative. I think it's amazing. Chi McBride is wonderful as the principal. My husband and I got married in 2012, we had a Boston Public-themed wedding because we're huge fans. Everybody dressed up as their favorite character. And when we arrived at the reception? Instead of announcing us as the bride and groom, they announced us as the Chi McBride and groom. Just for fun.

She giggles at first, but I think I'm wearing something on my face, because her chuckles trail off. I suddenly remember the incident at the coffee shop.

Tebow. Oh! Oh, uh, Chi McBride instead of bride! That's hilarious!

The color returns to her face.

Payless sales representative. You know, running through Toronto, you'll run into lots of different terrain. Concrete, asphalt, grass, parks, staircases ... maybe some hi-tops would be best.

Hitch hi-tops it is. I reach for my wallet, and remember that I still don't have any Canadian money.

Payless sales representative. No, no, don't worry. These shoes are sponsored. They're free, so long as you make a point to let people know that Hitch is now available on DVD.

Hitch has been available on DVD for nearly 10 years. I pull wads of paper out of the shoes and feed in the laces. They feel fine. Movement in the mirror catches my eye.

Payless sales representative. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. It's Ottawa ... there's ... I think four of them ... I locked the door, but that's not gonna keep 'em out. You sneak out the back, OK? The alley will take you to Blue Jays Way. Take your first right, that'll let you right back out onto Wellington. Find your teammates after that, they're probably somewhere east of here. I'll buy you as much time as I can.

Through the mirror I take one last look; the REDBLACKS are backpedaling toward the street. Now they're sprinting into the windows. All four smash through the glass, helmet-first, as I sneak to the rear exit. Not a second after I hear the glass shatter, I hear her:

Payless sales representative. Hello! You know, we just got in some Knowing flip-flops, just this morning. Would you like to take a look?

REDBLACK. The hit Nicolas Cage film?

Payless sales representative. Yes, sir!

I halt my breathing.

REDBLACK. Guys, I might need to check this out.

OTHER REDBLACK. I understand. The rest of us gotta go make a tackle.

I bolt out the back door. One down, at least. Only three of them to shake, I can do that. God bless you, ma'am. I'm sprinting up Blue Jays Way. A woman pushing a stroller waves.

Woman. Go Argos!

Tebow. Go Argos! Oh! And hey, Hitch is available now on DVD!

Woman. Starring Will Smith?

Tebow. Yes!

All of this is so weird and exciting. I love it. I am enjoying my life right now. As I round a corner on the sidewalk, I backpedal so I can continue to face her.

Tebow. Yes, ma'am! Hitch, the hit film starring Will Smith and Kevin James, is now avai --

I was clobbered like I had never been clobbered. My shoes, inspired by the hit Will Smith film, could not save me.

Play result: DANTE HALL pass complete to TIM TEBOW for 244 yards.

* * *

11:13 a.m. First and 10. Ball on BFS 245.

The Ottawa strong safety's helmet is under his arm; mine is still halfway across the street. I've got my hands on my knees, trying to get my wind back as we wait for the others to get upfield.

REDBLACK. Mr. Tebow, my bad on that. I didn't mean to clobber you like that. I've just never played bound-for-street ball before, and I was thinking about that commercial for that PlayStation game. Like, the football game ends, and the player goes home, and it shows him living his life throughout the rest of the week. Getting groceries and getting the newspaper out of the driveway in his bathrobe and stuff. And then he's cleaning his pool on like Thursday, and out of nowhere, BAM, a guy on the other team just wrecks him. Because it's like a really late hit.

Tebow. Yeah! I think I saw that ad on TV when I was a kid.

REDBLACK. Nah, man. I'm talking about the ad for the new one. I think it's for the new GameDay. Yeah, GameDay 2013.

They stopped making those games a decade ago.

The rest of the Argos and REDBLACKS round the corner.

Means. Timmy, man, I am so sorry. You joined up with the Argos so fast, we didn't even get a bound-for-street pack ready for you. You don't have the right shoes for this shit ... I didn't even think about it.

He unrolls a map.

Means. OK, so have a look. That flea-flicker of yours was a Hell of a play. My God, T, you can run. You took a big detour there, going shoe shopping and all, but even with that in mind, you gained at least 200 yards. That was easy going, though, right? Streets are pretty empty. But as soon as we correct course and get back on the right trajectory, it's gonna be a shitshow. People are everywhere.

Now in a way that's good, right? Because these are our fans, it's our people out there. And they're trying to make way for us as best they can, but those six hundred thousand people in the stadium have all set up shop downtown. On the sidewalks, out the windows, on the street in some places. Remember the end zone at the end of that Cal-Stanford game from the '70s? That's gonna be the whole field for a little while.

I'm still hurting a little, but I've got to test my arm with this ball. I take the snap, jav-in, and hit Freddie on a post route. It's not a great throw, but Freddie pulls it in. A hot dog cart throws a block for him and he bolts up Wellington Street untouched. He takes a knee near the John Street intersection.

Play result: TIM TEBOW pass complete to FREDDIE MITCHELL for 35 yards.

* * *

11:33 a.m. First and 10. Ball on BFS 280.

Mitchell. Sorry, y'all. There was nowhere to go except through some people, and I ain't tryin' to hurt anybody. I really don't know how we're gonna move past all this shit.

Freddie points at me.

Mitchell. That throw was alright, though. The way you throw is funny. I don't just mean throwing with your left hand, I'm talking about, you don't put the ball up here when you throw, over your head. Instead you're down here, you kinda throw from your shoulder. You know? And it makes sense 'cause the ball's heavier. You been training for this shit?

When I have a chance, I am going to sit down and think about that. Really think about it. For now, I climb to the roof of a nearby van and take in the view.

I shouldn't have done that. Everyone sees me, and everyone swarms the van. A sea of people feeds in from the east. The REDBLACKS are somewhere past the line of scrimmage, but I can only see a couple of them. The ground is gone. The Earth has vanished. I see nothing but people and things made by people.

I fall to a knee.

I put my helmet back on, because I am beginning to cry. Sometimes it's just you talking to yourself. I bet it's that a lot of the time, actually. But sometimes it's Him. This time it's Him. It was a sea of love, and I will tell you this: love is not necessarily secular. Sometimes love is awash in tribes, color schemes, brand names, trademarks. Sometimes they do not pollute it; they are it, or part of it.

Volquez pulls herself to the roof and stands beside me.

Volquez. You know what? A couple hours ago, I made the biggest play the Argos had seen in six years. You just had to fly your Yank ass up here and big-time me, huh? You know what, fuck you.

I think we can use this crowd.

She walks to the front of the van, yells for attention, and puts a finger to her lips. Within a few seconds, the thunder fades into a chorus of, "shhhhh." Soon, the mob -- the city -- is silent.

Volquez. You take the snap up here. I get down there and drive. Real slow, two or three kilometres per hour, like you're barely moving. Slow enough to move through all these people. Just snap it jav-out, be ready to swing at any REDBLACKS who try and come on board.

Volquez relays the plan to the others. Means decides that he'll acquire a second car in case I need to dump it off; he'll drive and St-Hilaire will stand on top. Keeping climbs on my van to give the snap.

Jeff Keeping, Argonauts center and 10-year CFL veteran. Listen, everyone. Do not let any Ottawa player near this van, please?

Nods and nods, a sea of them.

Tebow. Hello, everyone. I'd just like to tell you that Hitch, the romantic comedy with a twist starring Will Smith, is now available on DVD. Get your copy today. Hut!

Having forgotten her key, Volquez rifles through her pack for a mess kit. She pulls out a spoon and starts the ignition with it. We're rolling. The hum of this old GMC pierces the silence. This is the slowest I've ever run, but we're getting somewhere.

Tebow. See any?

St-Hilaire. No. I'm looking for helmets and shoulders. Nothing.

Fan in the crowd. Hey! Hey, I found a helmet! It's an Ottawa helmet!

Second fan. Wait, there are shoulder pads here. Just sitting on the ground!

I'm making circles. No movement anywhere.

Tebow. Volquez? Volquez, you see anything?

And then two hands grip my ankle. I'm yanked backwards. I lateral it to St-Hilaire just before my knees hit the roof. From behind my shoulder I spot a large man trying his best to push his way out of the crowd. He's wearing an Arcade Fire tour shirt that's too large, even for him. Volquez sees him, too.

Volquez. Shit! That's a reversible jersey!

All their clothing is reversible. Ottawans are a hyper-practical people. The defensive end is swallowed up in a sea of admonishment.

REDBLACK. Just reppin' Canada, bro!

Old woman. That's a Montreal band. You're Rest-Of-Canada, you can't claim them.

Man. Broken Social Scene is better! Speaking of bands.

Woman. The Beatles is a band.

Man. My uncle was in a band.

Woman. That's impossible. My uncle was in a band.

The REDBLACK hunches in shame; as I drift further away, he disappears behind a mob of scolding that somehow devolves into meaningless argument. Poor bastard.

St-Hilaire points the ball at my feet.

St-Hilaire. T. You lost a shoe, man.

Hey, everybody! If you see a shoe looking lonely out there, would you mind tossing it up to your quarterback?

There are murmurs of agreement.

We've gained about 50 yards on this play so far. It's taking half a minute to go 10 yards. It's like being on a johnboat. And it's quiet, too, like it is on the lake. Nereida slaps the side of the roof.

Volquez. Timmy, you're real quiet up there. Everything good?

Tebow. Yep. Just enjoying the view.

Tebow. You ever been out on a lake, when it's real quiet?

Volquez. Ha. Yeah. When I was 16 or so, me and some friends went out to Lake Nipissing, their folks had a boat. So we went out there, had some --

Tebow. Ha, wait. There's a lake called Lake Nipissing?

Volquez. Shit you not. Nipple, pissing. There, that joke was half our trip, you can feel like you've been there now. Anyways. We'd taken a bunch of stuff out there that we'd raided from their liquor cabinets and decided we'd make cocktails on the boat. Thing is, we didn't know what any of the shit was, really. So that's how you end up with plastic cups full of simple syrup and bitters.

Crowd. [chuckling]

Tebow. That's bad?

Crowd. [more laughing]

Man. Love you, Timmy!

Volquez. Do you drink?

Tebow. Nah, not really.

Dang, where's Ottawa? Did they quit? Is this just a parade or something?

Volquez. Well, it was stupid. Then a cop boat shows up and some cops come on board. They're checking IDs and shit, so I just bail, man. I dive off the rail and haul ass to the shore. I was nervous as Hell, just swimming as hard as I could. I probably sounded like you dumped a horse in the water. But shit, I made it. Didn't get caught.

I look down and see that a man is squeezing his way toward the van. He's got a little boy on his shoulders, maybe 8 years old. He's holding an Argonauts program and a marker. This is the first time I call her Ne.

Tebow. Hey, Ne? I think you've got a fan.

I can't see Ne, but you can always hear in someone's voice when they're smiling.

Volquez. Hello, young man! Come on up here. Folks, let these people through, OK? I know you got a little space, c'mon.

Kid. I'm -- I'm a big fan of you. You're my favorite. I want to be a running back, too.

Volquez. Well, right now I'm driving a GMC. It's not always that fun. What do you want to be a running back for? You wanna put me out of a job?

Kid. No. I want to take Natrone Means' place when he retires. I'm going to be huge when I grow up.

Means. Sorry, kid, no work for you here. I'm gonna play 'til I'm an old man.

Volquez. The fuck you are.

So, young man, here you go, and don't say the fuck word. Unless it's someone givin' you shit. And don't say the shit-word either.  And also, about the drinking story you heard? Don't drink until it's legal, OK?

Now Ne sticks hear head out the window.

Volquez. And what's the legal drinking age in Canada?

Crowd. Twenty-one!

Volquez. Except in Quebec, where it's?

Crowd. Twenty-one!

Volquez. Mhmm. So happy to meet you, fella.

The kid asks me to sign it, too. I'm happy to. I turn over on my belly and grab the marker, and he frowns.

Kid. You're ... what are you doing?

Tebow. What?

Kid. You're writing with your ... other hand. How do you do that?

Tebow. It's a magic trick, sir.

I sign his program, and then I look up, and something is dropping from the building. Something big and red and black. "Red and black." The team's called the REDBLACKS, and yet I'm completely unable to process the idea of a football player jumping out a sixth-story window.

I don't move. He's falling right into St-Hilaire's car, and I'm certain I'm about to watch at least one person die.

I want to take some time here to explain to you why no one was seriously hurt, and how this could be.

It's typical for an American visitor to Canada to take in its January climates and wonder why humans would voluntarily live there. In many parts of the country, the average low temperature hangs around negative-15 degrees Fahrenheit. It's not at all rare for the temperatures -- not the wind chill, the temperature -- to reach 25 below zero. During its day, the planet Mars gets warmer than that. A town in Yukon once recorded a temperature of negative-81 degrees.

Canadians can trace their ancestries all across the world, particularly in Toronto and Montreal, home to populations as diverse as any you would see in America. But once human beings survive a few Canadian winters, they toughen up in a very real way. They're hardened, both physically and spiritually. If you have ever driven a snowmobile through Nunavut, or stepped out of a Montreal metro station and been greeted by a thousand invisible daggers of ice, you might agree that it's not unlike, say, landing on the roof of a Rav4 from 65 feet.

This does tend to make a Canadian far less easily hurt, but they can still be knocked over. Maryse St-Hilaire is the best jav-fencer on the team, which is how she compensates for her small frame. She's 5'2 and 145 pounds, and with her swordsmanship, that doesn't matter at all. The Ottawa player -- I'll learn their names sometime, I'm sure -- goes ass-up and falls into the sea of people.

There are more. Yards ahead of us, the entire rest of the REDBLACKS defense is hanging out of windows and perched on ledges. Means says we should stop the cars, so we do, and he climbs on his roof.

Means. Timmy, we're in deep shit.

Tebow. Can we just back out of here, take another route?

Means. They'd have plenty of time to set up before we got there and try this shit all over again. See, look up there. Look at how they're positioned, and think about how slow we're going. They just need to tackle us one time, that'll put us on first down, then make three more tackles.

We're going so damn slow, they can bring us down four times before we go 10 yards. Easy. We might be faster than them, but with this crowd, it won't matter, we're all the same speed.

I ask my team for ideas. Nothing.

Hall. We ... I mean, we could see the drake. He lives right over there, in the opera house.

He's making kind of a stink-face as he says it, and so is the rest of the team.

Years ago, the drake ascended to the title of Toronto's Master of the Queen's Music, a title comparable to the poet laureate, which he also holds. As such, he has been granted lordship over the city's opera house. His talent for music and poetry is largely unrivaled, and it takes a very special sort of creature to be so vastly unlikable in spite of it.

Means. Maaaan ... There is a little open field between here and there, nowhere Ottawa can set up and jump all over us. We could get there ... I really just don't wanna do that at all.

Hall. We could hang out with him for a while, wait until the crowd thins out a little so we can actually get upfield. I don't like him either, but ... I mean, he's nice. He's a nice guy.

Volquez. I don't care about nice. Anyone can be nice. Guy's the worst. He's just the fuckin' worst.

Tebow. Who's the drake? What's so bad about the drake?

Volquez. It's like, you go over there, and then it becomes this whole thing. Every time.

Tebow. So the hang-up here is that he's a drag to hang out with?

Volquez. Such a fuckin' drag. God.

A half-hour later, at my insistence, we're at the door. The drake slowly opens it, and just as slowly, he beckons us to come inside. As I stagger past him with my missing shoe, he points.

The drake. It looks as though you have a Hitch in your step. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.

He isn't laughing, he's saying "ha," and he looks as though he might cry at any moment.

Play result: TIM TEBOW runs up middle, laterals to MARYSE ST-HILAIRE for 232 yards.

* * *

2033

I found a photo of the vase. Looks about right to me. He really was the worst to hang out with. Throughout, I felt devoured in poor conversation and insufficient companionship.

***

2014

The drake is a strange, slow creature. He skulks through an opera house littered with laundry. It's team apparel -- a Houston Astros ballcap, a Calgary Flames jacket, a Tennessee Titans jersey, a Milwaukee Bucks sweatshirt -- and it's lying on the floors, draped over chairs, hanging from the necks of violins.

At the moment, he's wearing a Kansas City Royals T-shirt, and he half-heartedly gropes at a Nebraska sweater that's wadded up on the seat next to mine. He doesn't make eye contact when he speaks.

The drake. Have you ever played Mission: Impossible for the Nintendo 64.

He always mutters. His entire life is a big, long, choreographed mutter, I think. No, I haven't played that game. I say nothing.

The drake. Well in the third level you have to get a keycard from the guard to get into the base. You have to wait until he walks behind the truck and then knock him out. Then you have to hide from the other guard. Then you have to open the gate. There's a thing on the side where you put your keycard in, so you put it in. Then ...

Why is he telling me this?

He's trying to pull the Nebraska sweater on, and it's kind of infuriating to watch. It's like he's trying to shrug his arms into the sweater without actually moving his arms.

The drake. Then when you go through the hallway, there's another guard so you have to shoot him. Then there's another guard and you shoot him. Then you go into the one room with the weird door and you turn off the security system. Anyways.

His head's through the hole of the sweatshirt, but the rest of his little adventure has ended in failure; the sleeves just hang down his chest like the world's saddest scarf.

He staggers in some other arbitrary direction.

The drake. Hey maybe I'm a Sacramento Kings fan.

he says as he slowly bends to pick up a Chris Webber jersey off the floor. He groans.

The drake. No ... no. I am a Nebraska fan right now.

Suddenly he stands upright, and for the first time, he appears to notice our uniforms. Maybe he's just now registering that we're even here.

The drake. You guys are the Toronto Argonauts. That is the city where this is.

He extends his arm, and slowly he turns to point in every direction.

The drake. Would you like to celebrate being the Toronto Argonauts. I am a fan of sports?

Finally, he says something that sounds as though there is a question mark at the end.

Nobody's answering him. Earlier, as we neared the opera house, Freddie pulled me aside: "Listen, man. Do not speak to the drake. No one must speak to the drake, no matter what he says. If you do, it'll turn into this whole big thing, and it's just impossible."

But I can't let us embarrass him like that. I feel terrible for him. Whoever this creature is, he's clearly harmless, and he seems quite lonely. So I answer him.

Behind his back, Freddie bugs his eyes and mouths at me, "Why?" Twenty or so of my teammates' groans echo through the hall, but the drake seems to hear none of them. He sits next to me, as slowly as he does everything, and softly says,

The drake. Let's be friends. Let's say things which friends might say. Do you have things to say?

Tebow. Umm ... oh! Hitch is now available on DVD.

The drake. I already knew that. Thank you for incredibly nothing.

We only need to stay in here 'til morning. By then, the crowd will have dispersed enough for our offense to move at a reasonable pace. It won't be so bad, Tim. Just kill some time.

The drake. Since you said a thing that was bad, I will talk for a little while now. Ah-huh. Ah-huh.

He's making the sound of clearing his throat, but not doing it.

The drake. What do you think is cool?

Tebow. What?

The drake. I don't know.

The drake reaches forward, pulls a Tim Salmon Angels jersey off the seat in front of him, and tries to spread it out across his chest. He lets it go and watches as it rolls down into his lap. He sighs.

The drake. Sometimes, things do not work out.

***

Everyone probably has at least one bad sleepover as a kid. Maybe your friend's parents make you go to bed too early, or maybe there's nothing to do, or maybe your friend just sucks. Waking up too early is the worst, though. You're in some other family's house, your friend's asleep, and you don't know whether you're allowed to turn on the TV and watch cartoons. You just lie there in your Dick Tracy sleeping bag and wait for the sun to rise all the way. Then you realize that it doesn't change anything, it just illuminates this place you're not used to.

I'm still aching from the hit that guy put on me at Wellington Street. I'm exhausted, but I'm not getting the blackout sleep I wish I would get. I'm getting those "new job" nightmares. I bet lots of folks who have started a new job recently will know what I'm talking about. It's a fitful sort of half-sleep in which you obsess over a problem. And the dream isn't even clear enough to know what the problem actually is. But you're obsessing over it anyway, buried in meaningless minutiae, stressing yourself out. It's awful.

They say one of the purposes of sleep is to let you process what happened over the course of the day. I find that I do a far better job of that when I'm awake,  so eventually I resign myself to lying there and thinking.

Throughout my life, football has always been in the business of telling me where and when to stop. Football's really more about what you can't do than what you can. If its players were grounded to railroad tracks, it wouldn't be so dramatically different: line up on this line. Put your fingers on the ground. No, don't move yet. Now move. No, don't put your hand there. Follow the play drawn up for you. It's a map. Follow the line. Stay inside of this box we have painted around you. Now there is a shoulder in your gut, planted there by someone very good at following nine hundred specific instructions.

Football isn't basketball, a sport so unnatural that they lay down pieces of wood to play on, thereby divorcing themselves from the earth. It isn't hockey, a sport so bizarrely fast and metallic and hard that humans might not have any business playing it. It's not baseball, a sport which, despite its natural aesthetic, follows wildly intuitive and unnatural rules that bring you back to where you started; it is the only team sport that a caveman could watch and not even begin to understand.

So in spite of its suffocating bureaucracies, football -- including the one I call football, the one with the helmets and the ball shaped like a baby -- is the sport most at home in nature. This brand of football, this bound-for-street? It brings football outdoors, where it has always belonged. We have opened the cages and shuttered the zoo.

I think about these things, and I think about why the Lord might have put me here. Maybe they do not play football in Heaven, and He wants me to know this beautiful life while I can.

So yes, I will play on, and I will play for ... another day? Half a mile? A month? Years? Where am I going?

What is waiting?

A dim light is beginning to creep through the windows, and it reveals the silhouettes of a couple REDBLACKS who have climbed up there. They're watching, waiting for us to cross the line of scrimmage.

I thought I was going to be apartment-shopping today.

* * *

I guess I fell asleep again. The drake's standing over me.

The drake. Hey!

Hey!

Hey.

Hey.

Hey!

Tebow. What?

The drake. 3D stands for three-dimensional. You knew that, right?

He turns and shuffles away before I can answer. Somehow, he's managed to get a Vikings jersey caught around one of his ankles.

The drake seemed sad to see us leave. I still think about him sometimes. I think he was on to something with all those jerseys and hats and everything. His allegiance drifted from one team to the next on a moment-to-moment basis; he was only after what made him happy at that instant, whether it was identifying as a Leafs fan or Hornets fan or Cubs fan.

I think back to those Florida fans I came to know in Gainesville. They were fans their whole lives, and so were their parents and grandparents. If that road leads you to a white-hot plastic chair, in 105-degree heat, down 22-7 to Arkansas while Will Muschamp calls a run up the gut on second and nine ... why are you on that road? I've never really been a fan, because all my time has always been consumed with being a player, so far be it from me to issue judgment. But I would prefer to reserve my loyalty for those in my life who might recognize me.

He really was the worst, though.

* * *

10:44 a.m. First and 10. Ball on BFS 1,059.

We've spent all morning picking up 30, 40-yard chunks. Nate points upfield.

Means. Timmy, we gotta put some food in you. There's a diner right up the street there. I'm thinking we call a breakfast play.

So that's what we do. Home-field advantage is quite a thing in bound-for-street football. It's what allows me to run 50 yards upfield, stop at a restaurant, and have breakfast in the middle of the play. The manager lets us in, and when the Ottawa players catch up to us, he exercises his right to deny service. They pace outside the window, waiting.

I take a seat.

Play result: TIM TEBOW runs up middle for 47 yards.

10:55 a.m. First and 10. Ball on BFS 1,106.

Means. Ah, damn. Timmy, you just sat down with the ball. That's a kneel. Loss of down.

Tebow. C'mon, man. Nobody saw it, it doesn't matter.

Maaaan, the look he's giving me. If certain people -- people of character, who you come to really respect -- shoot you a look like that, you feel shame. Nate is already one of those people, and in all the times to come, I'll know him as one of the greatest men I've ever met.

Means. Timmy! My God. Look, I know you're tired, all this is new to you, you're going through some shit, you're hungry. All of us are. And I'm not trying to crawl up your ass right now, and you're the leader of this team. But the Toronto Argonauts do not pull that shit.

I am shamed. The funny thing about being a religious man surrounded by those who might not be so religious: when you do something wrong, everybody notices. You're held to a higher standard by people who don't even buy into that standard, necessarily. This is not a complaint.

Means. Listen, forget it, OK? It's a whole different system up here, and you're adjusting. I know it's a Hell of a lot different. It took me a while to adjust, too.

The food arrives, and I dig into it like a starved dog. Poutine is a popular dish up here. Variations abound, but the basic definition of poutine includes a pile of fries, gravy, cheese curds, a half-pound of bacon fat, parmesan cheese, butter, steak, chocolate, Crown Royal, malt vinegar, mayonnaise, ketchup, a few fried eggs, crushed oatmeal cookies, Ranch dressing, foie gras, heavy cream, maple syrup, raspberry jam, ground beef, three tablespoons of salt, cocktail sauce, guacamole, Doritos, hoisin sauce, fried chicken, Starburst, blood sausage, calamari, butterscotch pudding, barbecue sauce, duck carpaccio, corn syrup, potato chips, fried oysters, boiled peaches, beef jerky, coffee creamer, a pickled hard-boiled egg, rocky road ice cream, three packets of Ramen noodle seasoning, $5, fried candy canes, onion rings, triple sec, pizza rolls, a braised pork butt, cake frosting, Olestra, and pancake batter. One popular variant calls for a slice of blueberry pie set gently on top, but purists frown upon it.

There are 17,000 calories here, and I am in love with them all. It is the finest meal I've eaten in my entire life. I look up only briefly to take in the sight of a man wearing both football pads and reading glasses. Nate is flipping through maps and taking notes. He has a plan.

Means. Tim, I want us to advance the ball past the city, and I want to do it today. I'm thinking a go route. Do you mind if I call this play?

Tebow. I'm good with that.

Means. All right. I'm gonna need to work on this ball a bit, make some adjustments. I've got to down it in order to do that, so we lose a down, but I think it's worth it.

Play result: NATRONE MEANS kneels for -2 yards.

11:04 a.m. Second and 12. Ball on BFS 1,104.

Nate fishes an eyeglass screwdriver out of his and pack sets to work on removing a series of screws from the seam of the ball. The whole ball opens up like a clam shell, revealing a grid of a dozen or so slots, some of which are filled with these metal discs.

Nate looks up at me.

Means. Damn. They didn't tell you about this either, huh?

* * *

I love the CFL regulation ball. I love it. Look at it. It's amazing. You see those 17 little slots?

Each one of those slots holds a weight that's about 0.3 kilograms. If you fill every slot with a weight, the ball weighs about 12 pounds, including the ball's chassis. The team in possession of the ball is at liberty, at any time, to add, remove, and re-arrange these weights to their liking.

If you wanted to throw it like a standard American football, you'd pop out all the weights and push the javelin inside the ball, and it wouldn't weigh too much more than an NFL ball. If you want the ball to take subtle little curves and dips when you throw it, you might pop weights into one side -- b6, b7, and b8 -- to make it lopsided. If you want to throw it like a dart, perhaps for a short-yardage situations, you'll front-load it -- b1, b2, b3, b6, b9. And if you want to engage in some open-field swordplay and smack some defenders to the ground, you might just load the whole damn front -- b1 through b11. Catching one of those is like being hit with a big sack of nickels.

This feature is a holdover from the earlier days of Canadian football. Though it's still legal, and every CFL ball has this functionality, it's almost as rare as the drop-kick field goal is in American football. It seems almost criminal not to take advantage of it.

Nate's re-arranging the weights like backgammon pieces, testing the ball's weight, setting it down, re-arranging some more.

Means. Alright, Timmy. I think this is the ball I'm building you. I don't know if anyone's used this configuration before.

b3 is the only weight in the ball itself. All six javelin slots, however, are filled up. Nate wants this thing to fly like a Learjet, keeping a horizontal orientation, with the nose pointed forward, for as long as possible. He figures that a straight column of weights, situated to the rear, might accomplish that.

Hall. How about just a little more weight up front? Might make it a little bit more accurate.

Means. Two reasons. For one, this ball is about five pounds as is. For another, D, I want to keep the front soft, give it some give. Because you're gonna be catching this ball, D. And I like you, and I would rather not kill you.

* * *

We've unrolled a big laminated map across the table; some bags of salt and pepper are holding down the corners. Nate has called for the entire team to huddle around.

Means. OK, y'all. Tim has granted me one-time authority to draw up this play, and that's what I've spent the last hour doing. You might have noticed the crowd getting thicker out there again. It's not quite as bad as it was yesterday, but Ne's done a little forecasting, and she figures it's only gonna get worse. This, if the play works out how it's supposed to, is good news for us.

So, take a look here. Right behind us right now, we've got First Canadian Place. Ahead of us, we've got the Simpson Tower.

Means. Timmy, you're gonna take the snap and drop back in the pocket. Way back. You'll drop about 100 yards behind the line of scrimmage. Then you go inside First Canadian, take the elevator, and make your way to the rooftop. This is the second-tallest building in the city, so this might take you a few minutes.

Dante, you make your way to the Simpson Tower. That's so far off, your man will probably think you're supposed to be a diversion and peel off you. Good. So then you get to the roof, and Timmy throws it to you.

Hall. How far is that, a hundred yards?

Means. Triple that.

Means. I know this sounds crazy to y'all. Three things, though, three things. First thing is, this isn't a 300-yard throw the way we're used to thinking about throws. Once you get to a rooftop, you ought to have a lot of wind to work with. Just wait for the wind to blow in from the lake, and throw it. This ball's fairly good at riding the wind, especially with the jav out.

Second thing. Timmy, you gotta ditch your NFL throwing motion. It's garbage.

It's the reason I couldn't keep myself in the NFL: my throwing motion was a little low, a little slow. My delivery was just a couple tenths of a second slower than the average quarterbacks, but it's a league of razor-thin margins. It's been tough to unlearn that, to adapt a quicker throwing motion.

Means. Go back to your old throw. That's what me and Ismail were wondering about before we brought you up here, man. We think your old throwing motion, the one you had at Florida, it's perfect for one of these CFL balls. Less emphasis on release time, and more on velocity. My hope here is that with all these things working in our favor, Tim, you can make that throw.

There's no way. There's no way I'm supposed to throw like that.

Means. And the last thing. See all this open space to the northeast? The suburbs, the country? The payoff here could be monumental.

Listen, y'all, I'm already tired. Do you want to keep on pecking away at yardage, trying to fit through this crowd? Which, by the way, is back today? If Timmy can chuck that ball to Dante, and he catches it, that puts our ball carrier past the crowds, and way past the Ottawa secondary.

D, you'll be able to run your ass off. Out to the suburbs.

Volquez. That could be a 20-kilometre gain.

She turns to me and her eyes widen.

Volquez. Tim? You know how many miles that is?

Tebow. It's, uh ...

Volquez. It's a really fuckin' long way.

* * *

We're about three minutes into the 72-story ride up First Canadian Place when the driver turns and smiles.

Driver. You're Timmy Tebow, aren't you? What are you doing so far behind the line of scrimmage?

Tebow. I'm dropping back in the pocket, My wideout's running a go route. I'm gonna try to hit him at the Simpson Tower.

Driver. That's a couple blocks away! Are you sure?

Tebow. I'm sure that's the building, yeah. I'm not sure whether I can hit him.

Driver. Hell of a game you guys are playing. I've been following it on the shout-pipes. I remember watching it on the TV, when the BC Lions went bound-for-street. That was back in the '80s. That was the last bound-for-street game up until you fellas did it.

The Lions only got five or six yards into the streets, though. You fellas are way far out here.

He returns his gaze upward to watch the ceiling. It's a windshield, basically, with little windshield wipers and everything.

Tebow. How come you've got a wheel?

Driver. How come I've got a wheel?

Tebow. Yeah.

Driver. So ... I can drive the elevator.

Tebow. Do you need to steer it, though?

Driver. Nah. I always just drive the elevator straight up or straight down. Those are pretty much the only directions that folks need to go on an elevator. Do you need to go left or right? I could see what would happen. Never done it.

Tebow. No, thanks. Just up.

The Canadians, unfortunately, are in the process of innovating themselves into a corner. They're developing new technologies, and adapting new modes of living, that save and generate as much wealth, resources, and energy as they'll ever need. It's all being produced in such abundance that employment is becoming unnecessary to acquire wealth. This is an unexpected problem for Canadians, who are a considerably industrious people. They want to work. And so initiatives have recently been implemented to create "make-work."

This elevator is an example of that: contractors were assigned to equip it with a steering column that may or may not attach to anything. It's equipped with life vests. It has a flare kit. These were all installed by people who worked for the sake of work. So does this man, who has gripped this steering wheel every day for years, and has never turned it.

Driver. Hey, where's your shoe?

Tebow. Somewhere on Wellington Street, I guess. I lost it yesterday. Oh, reminds me, though. Hitch is now available on DVD.

Driver. You kiddin' me? You serious? The romantic comedy from the director of Fools Rush In?

Tebow. That's the one!

Driver. Does the DVD feature director's commentary?

Tebow. I would imagine so.

Driver. Does it also feature extras such as outtakes, interviews, and mini-games based on the hit film?

Tebow. I ... I honestly don't know.

Driver. What?

Tebow. I'm sorry, I'm just not sure.

Driver. Well, what the fuck? I'm just asking questions and you're making me look like some kind of dick? How the fuck can you tell me something like that, and --

His sea of profanities are drowned out by the horn, he's just laying on it with the base of his fist. He might be honking at me, I'm not sure. It is a long, awkward rest of the way up to the roof. I have felt hurried in the pocket before. I have felt fear, and I have felt panicked. This is the first time I have ever felt awkward.

* * *

Some of the REDBLACKS tried to give chase, but the elevator drivers won't give them a ride up, so they have to take the stairs. Home-field advantage comes through again. They won't be up here for another few minutes at the least, which is fine, because Hall still hasn't shown up on the Simpson Tower rooftop.

I don't ask God for help. He's already built everything, right? He's already decided how all the parts will move. Asking him for help feels like suggesting that He's forgotten something, or hasn't thought of something. No, instead I simply thank him, or let Him know when I'm sad or pissed off. There's been a little bit of the latter lately, like when I finally reached the NFL, I found that the throwing motion that got me there made me as valuable as a hill of shit.

But mostly I thank Him. I'm doing that now. I am about to attempt a 300-yard pass, and I have a gorgeous view. I'm a little scared of heights, as any reasonable person would be, so I get on my belly and crawl to the rooftop's edge. The crowd is gathering near the floor of this building, but it's thinning out near the Simpson Tower. Dante's gonna have a straight shot.

There he is! He waves. I take a few deep breaths and a dozen paces back. I mimic a few throws with the ball, and it's heavy, but ... it feels correct. I can tell you it feels perfectly balanced, without being able to explain how.

A man with one shoe, on top of a roof, hurls a ball with his entire body. His shoulder will ache for days. The ball flies so far away, he can barely see it.

It reaches an apex. It doesn't stall; the javelin sticks out sideways, stabilizing the ball, almost pushing it forward more quickly than it's falling. Dante is dancing on his rooftop; he looks like he did when I watched him on TV in high school, fielding a punt, waiting for it to fall to him.

It's falling.

God loves football.

***

Music: "Numbers On The Boards" by Pusha T
Chapter Three →

Chapter III

Dante Hall catches that ball, staggers to his feet, and waves goodbye. And then he's gone. Gone.

If you watched him return kicks in Kansas City, you know how fast he can move. You also know that he's a master navigator. No other ball carrier has ever used the width of the field like he did. He leveraged it like a weapon, a means of sorting out his opponents, arranging them as he saw fit, creating holes and then darting through them. He'd move left and right like a typewriter carriage. Sometimes he'd even run backwards, and he was the only man on the planet who knew it was going to work.

Ahead of him is open field. Nothing but daylight until, of course, the sun goes down. Lord only knows how far he's gonna run.

Danteemail_medium

Dante Hall:

Hey Timmy.

Tim Tebow:

Hey! Thanks so much. So first, I gotta ask you about that catch.

Hall:

It hurts like Hell.

Tebow:

Still?

Hall:

Oh, no, no. I'm just keeping it in the present tense. I was definitely sore for a couple weeks. Had a big bruise on my stomach, but that was about it.

So while I'm taking the elevator to the roof, I'm taking off my shoulder pads and sort of trying to stuff them up under my jersey, so it gives me a little protection in the stomach area. There's no rule that says you can't. I'm also going over how I'm gonna catch this thing. I'm used to catching punts and kickoffs, so getting my feet in the right place for a ball like that wasn't a problem.

I figure I'll just kind of let my body catch it. As soon as it hits me, I sort of double over and fall down. I only use my hands to keep it from rolling off me.

Thankfully, Nate back-loaded that ball, so it doesn't hurt near as bad as it could have. There are no weights in the front of the ball, so the nose sort of caves in and acts as a cushion. I have to smack it against the concrete a couple times to pop it back into shape.

Tebow:

I remember you just sort of lie there for a minute. With the jav out, it looks liked you've been shot by a harpoon or something.

Hall:

Ha. Yeah, it knocks the wind right out of me. That's five pounds of football. Speaking of which, I can't even imagine what your arm feels like after that.

Tebow:

It's not just that I throw my arm out. It's like I throw my whole side out. I use my natural throwing motion, with the ball a little lower than it's supposed to be, but I try to come up with a way to get as many muscles in on it as I can. I basically do a somersault. I throw with my entire body.

So eventually you get to your feet and ride back down to the ground floor.

Hall:

Yep. And it's just like Means was hoping: no REDBLACKS anywhere. They're all a couple hundred yards back, lost in the crowd. Meanwhile, I've got plenty of room to run. So that's what I do.

Nate and I went over the plan earlier: I just identify northeast, and haul ass in that direction. I didn't know the land all that well, but I had maps.

Supplymap_medium

Tebow:

This map shows all of Southern Ontario.

Hall:

That's how big we were thinking! I mean, listen. I'm the best distance runner on either team. Plus, I basically have a hundred-yard head start on the REDBLACKS. Plus, I'm in home field. Plus, it takes them, what? Twenty minutes to figure out what's going on?

Tebow:

About that, yeah. They call an Engage Eight. A Madden play, basically. You never see it in a real game, or at least, not in the NFL. But they call it, and when they see me running deep in the pocket, they must think I'm running for my life. But then they get up to the First Canadian rooftop, you know, where I am. They find out that I don't have the ball, and they're just furious.

Hall:

So if you look at that map, you see that all the locations of bound-for-street supply stations are marked. These BFS stations are basically little shelters that were built by the Argonauts in the 1950s, in case they ever went bound-for-street. They've got fresh clothing, food, water, beds, all that, the idea being that if the Argos ever got that far out, they could advance the ball to one of the shelters and rest up for a bit.

Now obviously, these have never been used. Ever. None of them. They're there because, well, it's Canada. People work hard, and people prepare for everything. But I like to picture the people who built these shelters. They must have been laughing the whole damn time. I mean, in the entire history of the CFL, teams have only gone bound-for-street like a half-dozen times. And they never got further than like 50 yards. They built BFS shelters fifty, a hundred, two hundred miles out. How the Hell would the Argos ever get all the way out there?

But we do. Me and you, Timmy. We do that. It's the longest completion in the history of football.

Tebow:

You sure do change directions a bunch.

Hall:

Always have. I try to stay on the roads as much as I can, and most of them are aligned to magnetic north. So I have to juke through the grid a lot. Even though I run 212 miles, I only actually advance the line of scrimmage by 150 miles. To be exact, it's a 264,669-yard gain.

You know what racking up a quarter-million yards after catch feels like? Well, it's Hell on your knees, but you know what it feels like on an emotional level? It's like the end of a friendly card game. All your buddies came over to play cards. For a while, everybody was really into it.

But when it ends, it's not like someone stands up and declares that the game's over. It just sorta gradually crumbles. A couple folks are talking politics. The big blind drifted over to the living room to watch the game on TV. The small blind is in the garage getting a beer. The dealer is on the phone with her boyfriend. And you look up, and you realize that you're the only one who still cares about the game. So you stand up, of course, because doing anything else would make you feel like a jackass.

Running all that way feels like that little moment, only it lasts a couple weeks. I mean, I'm just following the play, keeping it alive. But aside from the occasional friendly Ontarian, I'm the only one for miles around who gives a damn, who even cares. I figure y'all are running to catch up with me, but I don't know for sure. What if y'all decided to call the game, and you're just counting on me to figure it out and head back home? What if I'm that old-ass Japanese soldier, still hiding out in the jungle?

This is one Hell of a game, Timmy. In the NFL, I lived and breathed to chisel out just a little bit of open field. Now I had so much open field that ... I got lonely, man. Lots of cold, lonely nights.

I always keep the ball alive by tying it to a ceiling fan before I go to sleep. I'm thankful to have a roof over my head at all, of course, but a lot of the shelters I stay in haven't been decorated in 10, 20 years. There's just nothing to do. Not a damn thing. I'd eat a bag of sandwich, crash, wake up, and hit the road again.

A couple times I really did wonder why I was still playing. It wasn't even a football game, it was just running. And running to where? It's not like there was an end zone ahead of me.

This was why: I'm 54 now, so I would have been ... 36 then, I guess. I was out of the NFL by 30, and then I go return kicks in the CFL. That's barely plural. I returned two kicks in five years; the rest went way out of the back of the end zone. I couldn't quit, though. I just loved football so damn much, I wanted to be a part of it for as long as I could.

When you threw me that ball, as far as I'm concerned, it was the game making up for all the times I never got to touch the ball. That whole game, man. I never won a Super Bowl, but I got to play in that game. Stacked against that, the Super Bowl is ... well, it's a laugh. It ain't shit.

Tebow:

Yeah. I don't feel like I missed a thing.

Hall:

You're how old?

Tebow:

Forty-six.

Hall:

I'm too old. But you know the Broncos would take you back.

Tebow:

I'm not really interested ... hey, did you ever play that video game? The one that was in the BFS station in Maple Leaf?

Hall:

Yeah! You were there?

Tebow:

Yeah, we stayed there for a night while we were running after you. What was that game called?

Hall:

Anthony Calvillo's Field Position Football. It's like the CFL version of Madden. They had that in a few of the BFS stations, actually. It was so bad that even though there was nothing to do, I wouldn't play it.

Tebow:

I didn't get a chance to play it. Was it that bad?

Hall:

It was so fuckin' horrible. Worst game I've ever played. I couldn't even understand it.

Tebow:

I'm sorry I missed it.

So, just to make sure I'm remembering the math right: you cover that distance in 19 days?

Hall:

Yeah. So it's a little more than 10 miles a day. Mostly on the roads, although I cut through fields once in a while.

Tebow:

But then you stop.

Hall:

There are a couple reasons that'll convince me to stop sooner or later. First, my feet are a wreck. I'm a pretty good distance runner, but I don't quite have that Canadian pith yet. I'm paying the price for living in the States in the offseason. If I'd stayed in Canada for two or three years straight, I'd have that resistance to the elements built up, and my legs wouldn't feel like they're about to fall off.

And it's getting cold. It's not devastating yet, but it's November in Ontario. It's about five degrees, and it's only gonna get colder.

Tebow:

Five degrees? I don't remember it being that bad.

Hall:

Celsius, Timmy! Good God, it's been almost 20 years and you still don't have the Celsius-Fahrenheit thing down. Multiply it by nine, divide by five, add 32.

I remember you asking me one time, "Why does Canada use Celsius? Why do they have to be so different?" I just laughed, because it was the most Yankee thing you could have said. We're the different ones. We're like the only ones who use Fahrenheit. America's basically that kid in first grade, that one left-handed kid in the class who's holding her fat little pencil all funny.

Tebow:

Yeah. And it would be unhealthy to try to make her write right-handed.

Hall:

Fair enough, I guess.

Another thing is, the snow is starting to dump all over Ontario. The roads are slick. If I'd thought about that, I would have asked the team to pack me some skates, but I didn't. So over the last couple days, I just stomp through the six inches of unpacked snow on the shoulders of the roads. This slows me down, but at least I don't slip.

But November 26th is the day I decide to stop, right then and there.

It's about 4:30 in the afternoon, it's starting to get dark. I'm in a field about a hundred yards east of Highway 62. I'm seeing all kinds of tracks, I figure they're deer or something. A couple football fields away, I see movement. Two wolves. They're running right toward me.

And I'm like, shit, I'm dead. I'm gonna die in the snow, a thousand miles from my home, and people are gonna talk about me like they talk about that Into the Wild dude. They're not gonna talk about my quarter-million-yard completion. I'll just be a jackass who died in the middle of nowhere.

I buckle down, ready to fight. I don't think anyone's fought wolves in a football uniform, so what the Hell, let's see what happens. Now they're right up on me. I juke backwards. It's the only weapon I've ever had, really.

They hit each other head-on, and both of them hit the snow like a bag of hammers. I haul ass to the next BFS station in Siberia, Ontario, a few kilometres up the highway. And then I stay the Hell put, until y'all finally catch up with me on the 30th.

Tebow:

And that was when we made the rule.

Hall:

Yep. If you get past the defense and have open field ahead of you, you go two hundred, three hundred yards at the most. And then you stop. You've got the first down, so just take a knee. Find some safety if you can. Climb a tree or something, and wait for everyone else to make their way up to you. The bears and wolves and whatnot, they won't mess with a pack of a couple dozen people. But they're happy to pick off a single person.

So that's it. I spend a few days in the BFS station, and I mostly just nap and try to stay off my feet. I spend American Thanksgiving all by myself, which is lonely enough. But I'm in this big endless land that doesn't even celebrate it. Canadian Thanksgiving was in October.

When you finally get up to the line of scrimmage ... man. I sure am happy to see y'all.

Tebow:

Thanks, D. Good talking.

Hall:

Any time, man.

* * *

DECEMBER 21, 2014.

Setting out from the Siberia BFS station, we gain about a thousand yards of offense per day -- more if we stick to the road, fewer if we make beelines through woods and fields. Our self-imposed "300 yards per play" rule seems like the only thing keeping us from springing loose for another 150-mile gain. The REDBLACKS can hit hard, but they just don't possess enough speed to put themselves in the right places.

Which isn't to say it isn't exhausting. It's like chucking logs into a wood chipper. The logs don't fight you, of course, but they're still heavy. We signed a sort of treaty with the REDBLACKS: we play sunup to sundown exclusively, because night bound-for-street play is dangerous, and because if we played any longer, we'd collapse.

Me, especially. That throw in Toronto shredded up my shoulder pretty good, and I was thankful to not have to touch the ball for three weeks, but my arm still isn't all the way back yet. I've been calling a lot of misdirections, throwing a lot of check-downs, running a lot of bootlegs. Anything to keep me from throwing further than 10 yards or so. It takes years for an American to build up the Canadian pith I'd need to bounce back to full strength.

For now, I'm just gassed, and the BFS stations are getting fewer and farther apart.

We've made it to Old Killaloe, about 25 miles from the Ontario-Quebec border. Old Killaloe is a ghost town.

The town was settled in the 1850s, and a sawmill attracted a bit of industry until the 1890s, when a rail authority started laying down track through the area. They couldn't manage a path through the terrain, so they simply built it a couple miles north. The whole town packed up and left all at once. Old Killaloe is a town of forgotten buildings that virtually nobody has bothered with for well over a century.

It's also very nearly where the drive ends, and it would be all my fault.

It's first and 10 on an Old Killaloe road. We round a corner and spot a house about two hundred yards north. It's big, and old, and has an Argonauts flag flying from the front yard.

Means. Bet that's a fan-made BFS station.

Tebow. You can do that?

Means. Nothing stopping anybody. I'm surprised to see one way out here, though. We're closer to Ottawa than we are to Toronto.

Tebow. We're still in Ontario.

Means. Yeah, but it's pretty much REDBLACKS territory up here ... I think we hole up in there, call it a day.

Tebow. I'm fine. It's only about 2:30.

Means. No, Timmy, you're not. You're beat up. You don't take care of yourself, the team falls apart, and this 280,000-yard drive is all for shit. And it's almost Christmas. I think we gotta have ourselves a Christmas, right?

I call for the snap jav-in and flip it to Volquez, who draws the defense and laterals it back to me. It's almost too easy. They have to sell out for a tackle to have any shot at bringing us down, but that just rips open a huge hole on the other side of their defense. I tuck the ball, run, bolt 150 upfield, and now I'm on the ground.

My leg just landed funny. I don't think I tore anything, but something awful's up with my knee. Ottawa's slow, but catching up. I've got to get to the house, so I push myself to my feet and get to hobbling.

The front door's locked. I turn around; the REDBLACKS are about 50 yards behind me. I rip off my helmet and smack it against the doorknob; it falls apart on the first try and the door creaks open. I try to take a knee, and I can't. My knee just won't bend.

My first choice is to stand here on my bum knee and wait to be tackled. And by one or more REDBLACKS, which feels like being run over by a school bus. My knee is at least intact, and I like it that way. The other choice is to ...

There's a staircase in the foyer. I hop my way up that one, round the corner, hobble down the hallway, and hop up another staircase to the third floor. They're inside now, I can hear them.

REDBLACK. Hold on. Quiet. Listen for him, he's in here somewhere.

Second REDBLACK. So anyways, Argyle is in the parking garage the whole time, he doesn't even know what's going on. And he's talking to this huge teddy bear --

REDBLACK. Shut the fuck up!

I'll crawl up these steps slow, hide out somewhere on the third floor. Maybe they'll think I went out the back door. I cringe every time the staircase creaks, but I don't think they hear me. I put my hand on the top step.

The entire staircase wobbles, crunches, and collapses. I'm hanging from a banister. There are running footsteps below me. I pull myself up and claw my way to the top.

REDBLACK. Hey, you OK?

Tebow. I think so, yeah.

REDBLACK. Well, we'd be happy to help you down.

Tebow. Yeah, I bet you would.

Second REDBLACK. Just checked the floor. That was the only staircase up there.

Nate was right. My knee is just the newest thing that's killing me. I've gotta rest up. I tuck the ball in my elbow, and very slowly, I try to coax my knee to bend.

REDBLACK. You tryin' to down it?

Tebow. Yeah ... I bent up my knee out there, it's making it tough. Hold on.

REDBLACK. You can't do that.

Tebow. What?

REDBLACK. You can't down it. You're not on the ground.

Tebow. What are you talking about?

REDBLACK. You're on the third floor, fella.

Tebow. Aw, shit.

You know I'm not much of a cusser, but shit's just another word for crap, and you can say crap.

* * *

DECEMBER 23, 2014.

America boasts no greater dispensary of miserable shlock than a Christian bookstore. You walk in, and the first things you see are Bibles. Special Bibles, though, marketed to teens, with the chapters and verses occasionally broken up by some editors who think enough of themselves to interrupt the Lord with segments about how shock rock is Satan's tool, or how gay people should feel ashamed.

By the cash register, you'll see little mints for sale. They're Christian mints! They're called TestaMints, and they come in little wrappers with Bible verses on them, the idea being that offering someone a breath mint is a Trojan horse for the purpose of witnessing Christ. I imagine the sort of person who reforms their beliefs because candy told them to, and I feel genuine, aching pity.

Walk a little further in, and you'll see Christian re-imaginings of board games, like Bibleopoly, that augment Old Testament trivia with ruthless capitalist dealings. Take a look at the music section. If this Christian bookstore is worth its salt, there will be a laminated set of papers stapled and tied to the wall. Flip through them, and you'll see a list of popular secular artists and their Christian equivalents: if you like Green Day, listen to MxPx. If you like R.E.M, listen to Jars of Clay (nope). If you like Ol' Dirty Bastard, check out God's Original Gangstaz. All of these CDs will cost eight bucks more than you're used to paying.

None of these things are stranger to me than the "Armor of God" toys. Ephesians talks about the full armor of God: the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the shield of faith, the sword of the Spirit. Paul pretty clearly wrote this as metaphor, but here you have an actual plastic set of wearable armor. A kid will run around in it, hit his little brother with the sword until it's taken away, and grow up to be the sort of Christian who reads Left Behind more than the Bible because there are guns in it. Please notice that the toy set includes the "Shin Guards of Peace," which I guess Paul never got around to mentioning.

I'm thinking of that Armor of God set right now, because I, too, happen to be repurposing the Word of God for violent aims. An Ottawan is below me, next to the collapsed staircase, and he's pulled a chair into the hallway.

Tebow. I wouldn't do that.

REDBLACK. You can't stay up there forever, buddy.

Tebow. I can stay up here a while. And hey, you gotta have your helmet on.

REDBLACK. What do you care?

Tebow. "A player shall be required to wear a helmet on the Field of Play and shall not voluntarily remove it while the play is in progress." That's the CFL rule book. Rule 1, Section 10, Article 2.

REDBLACK. Fine.

He straps on his helmet. I think that 150 some-odd years ago, this house used to belong to a missionary or somebody. The folks who set up this BFS station stocked the first floor with food, sleeping bags, fresh uniforms, new shoes. Up here on the third floor, though, there's nothing but Bibles. Piles and piles of them. There must be a couple thousand.

Yep, this guy's gonna try. He balances himself on top of a chair, and readies himself to make a jump for the banister. I take a Bible from the stack, a hardcover.

REDBLACK. Ow! Guh! Quit it!

Tebow. I'll do this all day. I've got plenty up here.

REDBLACK. I'm so sick of you hitting me over the head with the Bible.

Tebow. Well, I'm closer to God.

REDBLACK. Yeah, by like 12 feet.

If I let them get to me, we lose possession. This is the problem: since I'm not on the ground floor, I can be tackled, dogpiled, drug all up and down the hall like a vacuum cleaner, but I cannot be downed. So if they could get their hands on me, nothing would stop them from bum-rushing me until one of them strips the ball away.

My teammates can't help, either. The REDBLACKS are just plain stronger than we are, and they've claimed the entire second floor for themselves. None of the Argos can even get up here.

At first I thought, well, maybe I can just drop it out the window. Since gravity would pull it straight down, that's a perfect lateral, so it's a legal play. But the windows are all these thin slats near the ceiling. Even if I could get up there, I couldn't poke my head out and see where I was dropping it.

I can't fend them off forever. I do not know what I'm gonna do.

Floorplan_medium

DECEMBER 24, 2014.

It's a game of attrition. The REDBLACKS are trying to rebuild the staircase, but it's slow going for them, because I keep raining Bibles on them and knocking their hammers out of their hands. They don't really have a choice but to keep at it, because that's the only way I'll run out of Bibles. Once I do, I'm done.

REDBLACK. All right! All right. We're gonna call it a day down here.

Tebow. All right. Did I get you bad with that last one?

REDBLACK. Yeah, it went through my face mask. Got me right below the eye.

Tebow. Sorry.

Another one walks up the second-floor staircase and tosses me some dinner.

REDBLACK. Here you go, bud ... got you a bag of macaroni and a bag of beer. You like macaroni?

Tebow. I love it. Thanks.

REDBLACK. No problem. Oh yeah, and your teammates wanted me to ask you if you have any dirty laundry.

Tebow. No ... you asked that yesterday, remember?

REDBLACK. Yeah, I know. They asked me to ask you again. Weird.

DECEMBER 25, 2014.

It's cold, and it gets dark so dang early. And if you've ever spent a Christmas by yourself, you know the sort of weird loneliness that blows in. I've been carrying this ball for days -- well, figuratively, because I've fumbled it and left it in the bedroom.

REDBLACK. Hey, Timmy? You're lookin' kinda down.

Tebow. Well, yeah.

REDBLACK. No, I mean, you're looking sad. In the dumps.

Tebow. Heh. Yeah ... it's like I wanted to be a better football player. More elusive. And God was like, "All right. Now you're so elusive, you're missing Christmas."

REDBLACK. No you didn't, Tim. Merry Christmas.

Tebow. Merry Christmas.

And that night, I get the Christmas of my life.

The REDBLACKS have offered to let my teammates upstairs, with the agreement that we'd cease play, and that the Argos wouldn't try to block for me and sprint me loose. We also agree that we won't discuss strategy. A cease-play agreement isn't binding under CFL rules. I'm still the ball carrier in open field (well, if you ask the CFL rule book, I'm technically floating in the sky somewhere). But it's Christmas. Both teams squeeze into the hall, shoulder to shoulder, under dim candlelight.

Means. Tim, you doing OK up there?

Tebow. Yeah. Really happy to see all y'all, you have no idea. But I'm OK.

Mitchell. Hey, how do you take care of your shit up there? Plumbing's fucked.

Tebow. I tie it up in a bag and throw it out the window.

Mitchell. Yeah ... hey, how come you don't just throw the ball out the window?

REDBLACK. Hey! Hey now, no table talk.

Volquez. Hey Timmy. You wanna read us a Bible story?

Tebow. Huh? Oh, uh ... I mean, I know a lot of y'all aren't Christians, I don't know if --

REDBLACK. No, go ahead! It's Christmas.

Tebow. Ha. All right.

St-Hilaire. Tell a good one, though. We all know the one with Jesus in a manger.

Means. It's Christmas, you gotta tell that one.

St-Hilaire. A king wants to kill baby God and he doesn't. He doesn't even try all that hard. God's born in a barn. There isn't even a sex scene to explain it. I mean, tabarnak!

Mitchell. What's the best Bible story you got, Timmy? Like, the most fun one.

Ohhhh yes. This one's easy. First off, if you're going the action-movie stuff, you almost definitely have to go Old Testament. The New Testament is three things, mostly: God being viciously tortured and murdered, Paul telling churches he's disappointed in them, and mathematical puzzles about the end of the world. Those books are meaningful to me, but they aren't really crowd-pleasers.

Mitchell. Tell it in your own voice, though. Don't just read it.

Tebow. Yep.

I find a hundred other Bible stories to be more instructive, but this one, from a pure storytelling standpoint, is my favorite. I lick my thumb and flip to Judges, chapter 3.

Tebow. So God decides that Israel has messed up, that they've become evil. So He sends this king from Moab to conquer the Israelites. His name is Eglon. They live under his rule for 18 years.

REDBLACK. Oh, cool. Stephen Harper's in the Bible.

Lots of laughs.

Tebow. The Israelites are like, "Lord, please send us someone who will save us." So he gives them this guy named Ehud.

Ehud goes to King Eglon's palace to pay tribute. Probably a bunch of money or something, I don't know. He has some people carry it all in for him. They leave, but he sticks around, and he's like, "King Eglon, I have a secret message for you."

Eglon's like, "Ooh, a secret message!" So he tells all his servants to leave, and it's just Ehud and Eglon by themselves.

Now, obviously, the King's servants patted Ehud down to make sure he's not packing anything. And you know, when you draw a sword with your hand, you're drawing it from your left side. So they search all up and down his left side, and find nothing.

Y'all know where I'm going with this?

Volquez. Oh shit.

Tebow. They don't even think to check his other side. See, Ehud is left-handed.

Mitchell. SONNNNNN!!!!

I love this story so much.

Tebow. So Ehud walks up to the king, and he's like, "I have a message from God for you." He pulls out a sword that's strapped to his right thigh under his clothes and stabs him in the belly.

Now, the thing is, Eglon's fat. Like, really, really fat. He's so fat that when Ehud stabs him, he pushes the sword all the way in and the whole thing just disappears under his fat. Even the handle.

Ehud locks the doors in the room and escapes, I think he just jumps out the window or something. A little later, the king's servants try to come back in and find that the door's locked. They're like, "He's probably in the bathroom."

Mitchell. So people took shits in the Bible?

Tebow. Sure. Everybody poops.

Someone told me that a while back, and rarely do you hear so much helpful perspective stuffed into two words. No matter how legendary or important, "everybody poops."

Tebow. Eventually, they finally unlock the door and find their king lying dead. Meanwhile, Ehud has plenty of time to get away. He goes back to his people, and he's like, "The king is dead, now we're going to kill the Moabites and take back Israel." So they do. There are ten thousand Moabites, and they kill every single one ...

Oh, man.

Hall. What?

Tebow. I've never seen this part. This is a King James Bible, I've never read this story in the King James version. Listen to this part, I'll just read it.

"Ehud reached with his left hand, drew the sword from his right thigh and plunged it into the king's belly. Even the handle sank in after the blade, and his bowels discharged. Ehud did not pull the sword out, and the fat closed in over it."

Volquez. So he did shit himself!

Means. That was a real whodunit.

Later, as they all shuffle back downstairs, Maryse turns around.

St-Hilaire. Hey, Tim. Got any dirty laundry?

Tebow. Uh, no.

St-Hilaire. Well, look around and make sure.

* * *

DECEMBER 26, 2014.

I've settled back into my routine of throwing Bibles and napping. I bet it's three or four days before I lose possession. I'm kind of a mess, and I don't remember the last time I showered. Hey, something's crinkling in my pocket.

Hey, it's that Mayor's letter, the one he gave me all the way back at the Rogers Centre. I completely forgot I had that.

Fordletter_medium

That squat little man believes in me. I wish he would have added a fire escape.

What am I gonna do once I fumble? I just go home? I just go find a job? I'm feeling like a kid on a Sunday evening in January. All the football I would have played will live only in my imagination. God gave me a chance. I have wasted it. My future is one of lapel mics and catered media lunches with plastic forks that break in spaghetti and tie dimples and fluorescent lights and lying down rectangles of Bermuda grass and lying down pinestraw and programming my TV remote to turn on the stereo and interviews with the local free alternative weekly and chuckling and, yes, ha, yes, the CFL is pretty weird, yes, let me tell you about the rouge, ha, no, I did not see any Mounties.

My knee's feeling a lot better, but it's still a little sore. I roll off the floor, stand up, and stumble into the bedroom to bring out some more throwin' Bibles. I'm starting to run a little low, I'm all the way to the back of the closet now. Dang, I might only have a day or two left, come to think of it. I pull out a crate of Bibles stacked against the back wall. There's a laundry chute.

I drop the crate. They were trying to tell me.

I slowly creak open the little metal door, stick my head in, and take a look.

Tebow. SHIT!

I hit the back of my head on the door. St-Hilaire just scared the absolute crap out of me.

I drop the ball to her. Thanks to gravity's stubborn insistence on the right angle, this is, by definition, a perfect lateral. It also has to be the first lateral ever thrown on the Z-axis.

Maryse, you wanna tell it from here?

Maryse St-Hilaire:

Sure! I'd be happy to talk about it. What I remember, anyway.

The REDBLACKS were always patrolling outside the house, so any hope of catching a pass out the window was just about dead, even if you were able to throw it out to begin with. We just could not get any open field, and we obviously couldn't get up to you, either.

On that first night, I was down in the cellar to get some bags of wine for dinner when I noticed the laundry chute. Nate and I tried to figure out what to do. We would have tried to shout the play up to you, but we were worried Ottawa would hear it. We couldn't afford to tip them off. Because other than that, you were on the same page we were: there was just no way you'd be able to keep possession.

So you drop it to me and I bust out the tornado door in the basement. Nobody sees me. I get all the way downtown before it dawns on me: "Shit, nobody saw me." I'm about 500 yards upfield, so I figure I'd better stop and wait for my teammates to notice I'm gone.

It reminded me of second-grade recess. The boys were always playing football, but the more kids in the game, the more they'd argue. After a while, it was like they'd waste the entire recess period arguing about the rules, or who's on who's team, or something. So one day my friend's like, "Just pick their football up off the ground and walk away, and see if they notice." So I do. About five minutes go by before they even realize it's gone.

Everybody took so long to figure out what was going on. And I knew you were keeping quiet to buy me time, but I had plenty of that. I kicked open the front door of this bar that was probably boarded up a century ago. I'm only 20, and since the legal drinking age in Canada is 21, I'm not really supposed to be drinking. But I have time to kill. And the whiskey in there is amazing. I'll later learn that this is because they've been sitting around for a century, and a little bit of the water in the whiskey evaporated. They call that "the angels drinking their share."

Point is, I got hammered as fuck. I pride myself on being the first player in the history of football to get drunk in the middle of the play. When you guys finally found me, I was passed on the floor, using the ball as a pillow. Nereida was like, "I think that counts as a kneel," and the REDBLACKS were like, "Yeah, I guess it does."

By the way? Of course I was the one to take the laundry. Tabarnak. Viva gender roles.

Tim Tebow:

Thank you, ma'am. That was great.

St-Hilaire:

Any time, Timmy. Oh, one more thing. The Broncos keep calling me. They say you're not picking up the phone.

Tim Tebow:

I told them no ... I'm sorry they're bugging you.

St-Hilaire:

Just think about it, T. OK?

* * *

FEBRUARY 12, 2015.

I've led the team just a bit to the east of our intended path, toward a bridge just east of Pembroke. Bridges are relatively few and far between along the Ottawa River. The Highway 148 bridge looks like the best way into Quebec.

It's cold as all get out, and it's worse on this bridge with the wind blowing all over. If I could ever manage to develop that Northern pith, it wouldn't be near as bad, but I'm a man from Florida, and each passing minute in this weather is an attack on my spirit.

It might  be the wind, but it's probably my grip; I'm struggling to even feel my fingers. Freddie's about 30 yards up the bridge, but my throw slices to his left. It's off his fingertips, over the side of the bridge, into the river.

Mitchell. I should've pulled that one in.

Tebow. No, no, that was on me. I pulled you too far right. So ... can we get another ball, I guess?

REDBLACK. This play isn't over.

I know it before he says it.

REDBLACK. The ball hasn't hit the ground.

Tebow. Well, it will, right? It's probably at the bottom of the river already.

Volquez. Nope. It's sporting equipment. Sporting equipment has to be able to serve as a flotation device. Federal safety laws.

Tebow. Anyone want to dive in?

Means. We'd freeze to death in five seconds.

Alright. Next question.

Tebow. Maybe we go downriver and wait for it to flow to us. Where does this river flow into?

The REDBLACK doesn't say a thing. He's just grinning.

***

Music: "Heaven Or Las Vegas" by Cocteau Twins
Chapter Four →

Chapter IV

I keep having this dream. There is a football stadium, rested at the foot of a mountain, and filled with an army of players. They form rows and columns of red and blue. Just outside the stadium, in the streets and among the trees, there are even more. There must be ten-thousand of them.

At the top of the mountain, there is a giant cross, and standing on the cross is a man. He orders them to march.

He's pointing at me. They are coming for me. They are marching for my destruction.

MARCH 9, 2015.

I can't do this. I've decided I can't do the bags anymore. Not this morning, anyway. I pour my scrambled eggs out of the bag; I'll eat straight off the table if I need to.

Means. Timmy, you nervous?

Tebow. A little, yeah. I'm out of my depth with all this stuff. I don't know anything about legal battles.

It's been a few weeks since my pass bounced off Freddie Mitchell's fingertips and fell into the Ottawa River. We tried running east along the riverbank, just trying to keep eyeballs on it, but we stopped when we realized that we had no idea of how to retrieve the ball if we caught up to it. The water was as cold as it could be without being ice.

Our next thought was to find a frozen stretch of the river, wait for it to get stuck against a chunk of ice, and simply pull it out of the water. That meant that both the Argonauts and REDBLACKS had an equal shot at the ball, which was vastly preferable to the alternative of letting it sail all the way down to Ottawa. Canadian citizens are a part of the field in bound-for-street play, and are thereby allowed to touch the ball. Just as we had a strong advantage in Toronto, the REDBLACKS would surely leverage their home field advantage to intercept my pass.

We figured that the ice formations were our only real shot. The REDBLACKS recognized this. So they dragged out a whole bunch of dynamite. The were on the other side of the river, and they waved at us. And then they blew the river to Hell.

There's just not an answer for that sort of pass coverage.

Unobstructed, the ball floated the rest of the way to the REDBLACKS' home turf, where it was picked up by city officials, and that was when we were dealt an extraordinary stroke of luck. Ottawa, of course, is the nation's capitol. Upon learning of the "Argonauts v. REDBLACKS" case, the federal government intervened, and declared that they, and not Ottawa's city government, would issue the ruling.

Means. I'm sure the city government would have just given the ball to the REDBLACKS, and that would be that. But the federal government is full of members of Parliament from all over the country. Toronto included, of course. I think we have a very real shot to win possession of this football in court.

Tebow. So the Parliament of Canada was just bored? Is it really as simple as that?

Means. Yeah. There's just nothing for them to do. Canada solved all its disputes and settled all its problems decades ago. I mean, in terms of its economy, its social policies, its laws ... this country runs like a Volvo. They gave Parliament absolute judicial authority decades ago, because nobody else really wanted it or had any use for it.

Tebow. It's just incredible.

Means. Yeah. By and large, the only time Parliament actually does get to rule on something, it's because some poor lost Americans wandered up here and manufactured problems. That's our chief export. Problems.

Tebow. It's like Canada's the version of America where everything works right.

Means. Ha. You know, I try to stay away from the "version of America" thing. It feels presumptuous. Given all they're accomplishing up here, maybe we're the pale imitator of Canada.

Tebow. So America's Kroger-brand Canada.

Means. Right! They're Captain Crunch, we're Mr. Rhinoceros Pirate or whatever.

It's the little things. When you're in another land, without really thinking about it, you really come to miss the little miscellanea that compose your American experience. I love my American teammates up here. Not only because -- but because -- I can crack a Kroger joke.

So Nate and I tied our ties, buttoned up our suits, and walked into the House of Commons. And now we are going to complete this reception.

Speaker of the House of Commons. If you'll beg our pardon, gentlemen, we already had an item on the docket. Docket? Is that a House of Commons thing, or is that just a word for like a criminal court or something?

Tebow. I'm not sure, Speaker.

Speaker. Mm. Sorry. It's just been a really long time since we've actually had to do anything, I forgot the right words for stuff.

OK, so anyways. We will get to you gentlemen in just a minute. Our first item on the docket is a resolution ... let's see ... "A resolution to elevate our national blackout to stage five."

Members of Parliament, if you'll recall, we're presently at stage four of our energy conservation initiatives. For one example, the communications networks in most of our cities have been shut down and replaced with the shoutie networks, which require no electricity. This, of course, is in anticipation of a coming international energy crisis.

Stage Five will mandate that all nonessential electrical devices will be shut off for a minimum of 10 years. The power we save without cars, computers, lights, what have you, will be conserved for emergency services during this period. After this period, we anticipate our solar energy infrastructure to be fully implemented and operational, thereby ushering in a golden age of prosperity. All opposed?

Member of Parliament. I'm halfway through Kid Chameleon. Is the Sega Genesis covered under essential services?

Speaker. I'm afraid not.

MP. Drag.

Speaker. Any further objections?

... OK. Resolution passes.

I'm too nervous to pay attention. I've got a stack of legal documents in front of me. Most of them were prepared by St-Hilaire, the only member of the Argonauts to attend law school.

Speaker. The next and final item. "Toronto Argonauts v. Ottawa REDBLACKS."

So what we have here is, Mr. Tim Tebow threw a pass to Mr. Freddie Mitchell in a bound-for-street CFL game. It deflected off Mr. Mitchell's hands, off a bridge, and into the Ottawa River. The ball can float. Since it has touched neither dry ground, nor the bottom of a riverbed, this was and is a live ball. It is currently in the custody of the Canadian government, which, per CFL rules, is part of the field.

REDBLACK. That's correct, Speaker.

Speaker. And we in the House of Commons are now to decide whether to award possession of this ball to the Argonauts or the REDBLACKS. This decision will be regarded not as a judicial intervention in a football game, but simply as a force of natural law. Just as, say, gravity or the wind might aid a reception or interception, so shall our ruling.

Tebow. Understood.

Speaker. Please submit your legal arguments to the court.

Everyone knows what can go down in a dogpile. The players scrap for the ball under that heap. It's vicious. There's a punch in the groin, maybe a finger in the eye. This dogpile feels not unlike that, only instead of bodies, I'm obscured by layer upon layer of legal dealings I don't understand.

I rise from my seat and bring our documents to the Speaker. It's fifty pages or so, enough to intimidate a layman like myself. But then I look across from me. A REDBLACK is pushing an enormous stack of papers on a moving dolly. In fact, there are a half-dozen players, each of them bringing a mountain of paperwork to the front. By the sheer magnitude of their argument, our case looks like a joke.

I am going home. This is over. I close my eyes and see a 32-ounce thermos of gas-station coffee, sitting in a cup holder, I'm driving a Camry through a suburb of stucco and mulch, a land without sidewalks ... I turn into a cul-de-sac, the cup tilts over, it's spilling ... spilling ...

Speaker. Lordy, this is a lot to go through. Well, there's Ottawa for you. I will review the REDBLACKS' case first.

... My word ...

... My word! What is this shit?

He hastily flips through the REDBLACKS' documents, holding up each one to see as he does.

Redblacksdoc

Speaker. They're ... they're all like this. Like half the page is blacked out. Was there a misprint of some sort? Can someone do us all the decency of explaining what the Hell I'm looking at?

REDBLACK. No misprint, Speaker.

I'd like to take you aside for a moment, reader, if you ever exist at all.

You may have noticed that I've been typing "REDBLACKS" in all-caps throughout this story. You see, the Ottawa football franchise was founded in 2014, right around when the scourge of corporate branding was at its worst. In order for their brand to stand apart, the team made a request to the media: stylize our entire name in upper-case. It's a gauche idea and a completely ridiculous thing to ask of journalists. I'm sure you can find the press release on the Internet somewhere. It's just absurd. I'm only honoring their request in this memoir because I think it's funny.

Emboldened by ... themselves, I suppose, the REDBLACKS went even further. In official team documents and correspondence, "REDBLACKS" must be stylized in a 1,000-pt font size. And that, on this day, is how this Speaker of the House of Commons has found himself with tens of thousands of unnecessary pages, almost none of them readable.

Speaker. A thousand-point font. And you did this why?

REDBLACK. Gotta protect our brand, m'man. All branding. In today's social media world, you gotta stand out, you gotta engage with people. This is just engagement. Engagement, m'man.

Speaker. This isn't engagement, you donkeys. You must have killed a hundred trees for this nonsense.

REDBLACK. Well, we want possession. Words cannot properly express how badly, and how dearly, we want to make this interception.

We have been knocked all up and down Ontario, giving up turf a thousand yards at a time. As of this moment, the Argonauts have pushed us back to the 359,000-yard line. They are faster and more inventive than we are, and Tim Tebow has emerged as the greatest pure thrower in the history of the CFL.

We anticipate that as their American players grow more acclimated to these lands and develop their Northern pith, halting their offensive drive will be impossible. We believe that this may indeed be our last chance to stop them.

But you know, this is the age of social media. Gotta protect your brand. Gotta engage.

Speaker. Well, I'm not reading this shit. I hereby award possession of this football to the Toronto Argonauts.

He bangs his gavel and motions for the ball to be brought into the chamber. He takes it in his hands.

Speaker. Mr. Tebow. Catch.

The REDBLACKS' defenders have been waiting to tackle me for weeks. I scramble throughout the chamber, ducking under desks and running up staircases. I take a wrong turn and a REDBLACK delivers me the clobbering of my life.

And that is how I throw a 185,468-yard pass to myself.

QUEBEC

Natequebecemail

I'm sorry that I can't offer you specific dates for everything. All I know for certain is that we entered Quebec on March 9, 2015, and when we finally pushed the line of scrimmage to the edge of the continent, it was September 16th, 2026.

You may consider Super Bowl XLVIII, in which the Seahawks scored their first 36 points unanswered en route to a 43-8 humiliation of the Broncos. Think also of John Heisman, who sent his 1916 Georgia Tech football team against Cumberland College's team of 14 laymen, and wrecked them 222 to 0. Every fallen Washington Generals team. Every player in every mercifully blurry AND1 mixtape who has a ball bounced off his head. Every weeping six-year-old T-ball player who swung at the ball by holding the bat over his head and swinging it straight down against the plate.

All of those, even combined, are transparent in comparison to the Toronto Argonauts' 11-year trashing of the Ottawa REDBLACKS. We shove the line of scrimmage across plains and around lakes and through craters and up and down mountains and across the whole of endless Quebec.

I try to remain a humble man. I take no special joy in humiliating these REDBLACKS. I'm bragging as much as I would be bragging if I told you that I held a glass of wine in front of me and dropped it and it shattered on the floor. We whooped them all up and down French Canada. This is a statement of fact.

He was fine. The Northern strength that I'd developed was the same constitution that allowed the REDBLACKS to sustain a stiff-arm that sent him rocketing a hundred feet through the air. They did, at least, appreciate it if I could at least knock them into a body of water, and I obliged whenever I could.

And God bless them, they never quit.

Nereida Volquez.

Hey, Timmy.

Tim Tebow.

Oh! Hey. I was just working on that memoir I've been talking about.

Volquez.

Oh yeah? How are those paintings coming?

Tebow.

They kind of suck. We all look like fat little R.B.I. Baseball men. You know what's hard to draw, is legs. Anyways, I got to the part where we're in Quebec.

Volquez.

That country's gorgeous. Just wish it could have stayed nice all year. I mean, I know we stopped counting the days after a while, but I think we ... hey, I'm sorry. I'm totally interrupting you.

Tebow.

No! No, no. I'd love it if you took a turn and talked a little.

Volquez.

Happy to.

So the Americans -- you, Dante, Nate, Freddie, Peterson, everybody -- I think it was our second winter in Quebec when you guys first built up your Northern strength. The REDBLACKS couldn't stop us, but the weather still could. We'd have to stop playing four months out of the year just to set up winter camp and stay out of the cold.

Tebow.

It's funny. All my life, my favorite day of the year was the day it first got cold in the fall. The air got all dry, you made crunching noises when you walked. It even sounded different, because all of a sudden all those Florida neighborhoods full of all those noisy air conditioners would finally shut up. God may as well have poked His head through the clouds and said, "Hey. Tim. It's time for football."

In Quebec it was different. That's the day you're like, "Welp. Time to start building a yurt."

Volquez.

It was cold as Hell. Even in the middle of the day, the temperature averaged about negative-10 Fahrenheit. There was so little sunlight in the winter, too. The sun would go up at 11:30 and set at 12:45.

We got some of our supplies from trading with First Nations folks, and some of it from the airlifts. Have you gotten to that yet?

Tebow.

Nah, not yet.

Volquez.

Well, you know, the CFL commissioned monthly airlifts to get supplies to us. Uniforms, food, building supplies, basic living essentials. And you and the other Americans thought it was just hilarious. Just because all the stuff was branded with movies and TV shows and stuff. I still don't get it.

Tebow.

OK, here's the thing. They weren't just any movies. It's not like having, like, a Batman sleeping bag or something. It would make sense for there to be an official Batman sleeping bag, because everyone knows Batman. But I'd open a crate and find, like, Remains of the Day pajamas.  The CFL pretty clearly hired a cut-rate supplier for us. America's got countless warehouses full of worthless shlock that nobody buys, and it sits around in the dark forever. I think they just took it off their hands on the cheap. Like, do you remember my Hitch shoes? It was a decade-old movie, and nobody would conceivably ever want Hitch shoes.

I remember one time, Freddie hiked out into the woods to get one of the crates they dropped. And he comes back, and like, he's wearing a Monkeybone shirt and Kangaroo Jack pants.

Volquez.

You two laughed so damn hard. Pants are pants. Who cares?

Tebow.

I'm just saying, you would have thrown away that Gigli dishware if you'd ever seen the movie.

Volquez.

Well, I'm happy you found them so amusing. The CFL made a pretty huge effort to get us that shit at all. They successfully argued to Parliament that under Canada's blackout laws, the planes counted as an "essential service."

You've been over that, right? Like, you've explained the blackout part?

Tebow.

Still getting to it.

Volquez.

Fuck, Timmy! All right, well. Very short story version: The world's running out of power, Canada sees it coming and figures out how to generate electricity forever. But it's gonna take 10 years or so to build all the infrastructure, so they conserve their coal and whatnot for all those lean years.

So Canada's just totally blacked out. Northern Quebec and the prairies are even emptier of people than it used to be. No cars, no lights, nothing. No way to know what's going on in the rest of the world.

Tebow.

Yeah.

I missed the States. You guys pulled me through it. And, you know, the peace and quiet was nice. And out there, there's a lot more of God's creation and a lot less of the stuff Man has slapped all over it.

But I missed home. I always wondered who was winning the AFC West. What everybody was doing. Whether Johnny Manziel was making good.

Volquez.

I remember you used to like to go off by yourself sometimes.

Tebow.

Once in a while, yeah.

Tebow.

I remember one time I was out there, just going for a walk through the woods, and I ran into Todd Peterson.

Volquez.

Poor Todd, man.

Tebow.

I mean, what's a kicker supposed to do in a game like that? It's not like there were any goalposts out there. Even if there were, why would we ever want to kick a field goal? We were gaining all the yardage we wanted. Hundreds of thousands of yards.

Well, this is what. I see that he's built this practice net for himself. You know, the ones you use to warm up for a field goal. He's just out there with a practice ball. Kicking into the net over and over. He doesn't know I see him. I could see people having a laugh at this, but I just felt bad for him.

Volquez.

I blew up at him once, you remember?

Tebow.

I do.

Volquez.

Whenever we got a first down, we'd wheel all our shit up to the line of scrimmage. It was already a bad day. You'd called a slant route that sent me running into a bee's nest. I've got bee stings, I'm tired, hungry, pissed off at everything.

We're taking our stuff up over this old dirt trail. Todd could easily be carrying his net, but he just drags it behind him, and it's hitting every rock in the road. Clang, clang, clang. All afternoon. And this is somehow the last straw for me. I'm like, "Todd, give me that fuckin' thing." I grab it from him and I slam it on the wagon, but when I do it breaks in half. I'm looking at the half I still have in my hand, it has "property of todd" carved into it. Like anyone would ever want to steal it. I look up at him, and he's crying.

I felt horrible. I've apologized to him a hundred times, but I still feel bad about it.

Tebow.

I always felt like I kind of related to Todd. He played football all his life, he had been there and done that. And now, he was just hanging around for no reason. The difference between us is that, you know, I eventually found a team that could use me. He just didn't.

Nothing will make you lonelier than not having purpose. Purpose is like gravity. All the friends and fans and everything? Without purpose, they're just floating there, the universe is like a big soup.

Volquez.

I'm glad you found your purpose.

Good luck, Timmy. Love you.

Tebow.

Love you too.

* * *

AUGUST 2020.

We're just about halfway across Quebec. We're holding up well, and everyone's generally in pretty high spirits, I think. A few players have married each other. A REDBLACK had a baby last year, a little boy. He's a little terror these days, running through camp every night around dinnertime. I love that kid.

The supply crates keep on falling out of the planes. I just wish they'd stuff a Sports Illustrated into one of those crates. A New York Times. Something, anything, from home.

Thank God for Nate. Back in 2014, he must have been the only quarterback in the CFL to do prep work for bound-for-street football. No other team ever even bothered, I don't think. Even if a team did go bound-for-street, which happened once every 25 years or so, it's not like they would have expected to go more than a few yards past the end zone. But Nate thought big. He never showed anybody his binders upon binders full of maps, star charts, and field guides identifying safe-to-eat berries and roots. Everybody would have thought he was nuts. But that's Natrone Means. He just dreams as big as he feels like.

We've got all of Quebec mapped out, and the REDBLACKS don't. That, frankly, has only been a major advantage in occasional specific circumstances -- for instance, you hit a river and turn east, because you know there's a bridge a few miles up the way.

There's really only a handful of natural features in Quebec that, if played properly, would have a big payoff. I'm driving our offense just a little further East of our trajectory, so we can make our way to just such a place.

Tim Tebow:

Hey, Henry, you there?

Henry Burris, Ottawa REDBLACKS free safety:

Sure am. How's business, man?

Tebow:

Oh, you know. It's going.

Burris:

You know, I was thinking on something the other day.

I used to be a quarterback. I started exactly one game in the NFL, for the Bears in '02. You know a quarterback's bad if he only started one game, ever. But of all those quarterbacks, in all those games, I'm the only one to throw four interceptions and no touchdowns and complete less than 40 percent of my throws. Nobody else has done that in the NFL since they started playing Super Bowls.

So from a lot of perspectives, you could argue that I'm the worst NFL quarterback ever. That's why, when I join the REDBLACKS, they're like, "Yeah ... we think we're gonna put you on defense." So I'm a safety. And in hilarious, cataclysmic timing, my first season ends in a defensive stand that lasts years and years. Y'all beat our asses up and down.

I think all this together makes me the losingest football player in the history of the planet Earth.

Tebow:

Sorry about that.

Burris:

Eh. Wasn't all bad. It was nice, actually. Countryside's beautiful out there.

Tebow:

So I'm trying to piece together a recap of the play. The big one. I can't really tell this story without y'alls' perspective. What's Ottawa's thought process here?

Burris:

Well, we don't have very detailed maps, and don't have much feel for the lay of the land, especially once we get this far up north. We sort of suspect you're taking the line of scrimmage a little further east of your trajectory, but figure that maybe you're just a little lost or something.

We get to the Manicouagan. There are a few ferries docked at the shore here and there, but y'all keep passing them up. Finally, you see two right next to each other, and you board one of them. We don't know why you waited until you saw two of them. I guess you're just being nice.

Tebow:

We're not.

Burris.

No. No, you're not. You're being a bunch of assholes.

So you sail across the Manicouagan, and we're in pursuit in the other boat. You disembark and head north into the woods somewhere. We head up there and try to find you, but then we notice flames and smoke coming from the shore. You gave us the slip. You turned back around and scuttled our boat, and now you're sailing back to the other shore, right where you came from.

Burris.

So I'm thinking ... why the Hell did you do that? I mean, yeah, you sunk our boat, so we can't go back and chase you. But still, we're upfield, right where we're supposed to be. We were like, "What are they accomplishing?"

You guys get off the boat and start walking West along the shore. So we follow you on the far shore. You're not making any attempt to cross. You ditched your boat. We think we've got you pinned down.

I must have spent hours staring at you through my binoculars. I was like, "Maybe they lateraled the ball to someone up here." But, nope. All eleven Argonaut members of the play were all on the other side. And you were still clearly holding the ball.

Burris.

This goes on for two weeks. Two damn weeks. We're still over here, you're still over there, and we're just walking.

And then one afternoon, y'all stop. You turn to us and wave. I think you're mocking us or something, but I see your faces through my binoculars. It's like you're ... sad. Guilty or something.

Tebow.

We were. We were playing the game the right way, I really believe that.

Burris.

I know, I know. I do too.

And then, y'all just turn around and walk away from the shore. So we're wondering if you just up and quit. I mean, the game had been going on for six years. We didn't recall any of you mentioning that you were getting tired of playing. But maybe you were. And then we got pissed off, because we don't understand why you destroyed our boat.

Again, we don't know the lay of the land here. So we split up and search all around. See if we can find another boat, or a village, or some First Nations to talk to. Anything. One group of REDBLACKS goes up and maps the land. The other group walks along the shore and maps it.

And this is what trips us out: the two groups keep running into each other. How? They're going in different directions, right?

Oh come on now, Timmy. Stop laughing.

Tebow.

Sorry. I'm sorry. So what's your reaction, like, the instant you figure it all out?

Burris.

One day I'm triangulating all our data and drawing out a map of the Manicouagan. And then I stop.

Awwwwwww, SHIT.

Burris.

We just followed you in a damn half-circle, until you were north and we were south, and then you bailed.

Tebow.

We were sure y'all were gonna figure it out at any minute.

Burris.

Well, think about it. That's a huge circle. Enormous. On an hour-to-hour basis, if you're walking along that shore, does it ever dawn on you that you're moving on an arc? It looked straight to us.

We killed days and days just not moving, trying to figure out where we were. By the time we did, you were long gone. And we never saw you again.

Tebow.

Gave you guys the slip. Forever.

Burris.

We knew it wasn't even worth it chasing you. It's one thing to be that guy on the special teams unit who runs after the kick returner even after he's 50 yards ahead of him. But that's, like, five seconds of hustle. This was asking five years. We knew it was done, and we went home.

* * *


Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable -- if anything is excellent or praiseworthy -- think about such things.

- Philippians 4:8

God gave us the beautiful features of the Earth to dwell on -- the mountains, the trickling streams, the oceans full of thousands of creatures we'll never know. Those appeal to our hearts, but God also delivered us wonders that appeal to our intellect. Big geological puzzles to solve. God orchestrated the planet for hundreds of millions of years, and left the evidence sitting there for us to behold when we were ready.

There's a string of five craters on Earth that would appear to be random events until we piece the continents into the singular supercontinent of Pangaea -- a theory which, in the typical and delightful fashion of our Creator, is supported by the craters themselves. About 215 million years ago, they rocked the Earth. One in the Ukraine, one in France, one in Quebec, one in North Dakota, and one in Manitoba. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

Set all the continents next to one another, and you see that all the craters run along the same, mostly-straight line. They form a chain. I like to imagine God planting His five fingers into the Earth and shaking it like a magic eight-ball. "Well, I don't know," the Earth said, "You tell me."

The biggest of the five, by far, is the Manicouagan Crater. You can see it from space.

For hundreds of millions of years, it was just a rock that crashed into a bigger rock, for no reason and with no meaning. It had to wait so long. It makes me proud that finally, we little humans could lend it purpose, however brief and insignificant on a geological scale. Even if the purpose mattered to no one but us.

* * *

JUNE 2023.

Yes, we are still playing, nearly three years after the REDBLACKS packed up and went home. It's completely fair to ask why we would still be out here. The first reason, which is probably rather unsatisfying, is that we are football players, and our appetite for open field is boundless. When we were kids, we'd watch Barry Sanders rip off a 75-yard run, and we'd think about it every night before we went to sleep until April. If you've ever played, and if you've ever had even a moment of broad daylight ahead of you on the field, my guess is that you think about it every day, a year later, 50 years later.

The second reason is that we have come to love this place. The vast majority of it has never been known by man. The land is so enormous that not even the First Nations tribes can say they've explored more than one acre out of every twenty. One day, surely, the whole of the Earth will be populated, every stone will be unturned, and no one will ever again be able to say that they saw what hadn't been seen. Discovery of this Earth is a finite commodity, and we are devouring it, hand over fist.

The third reason is that we have a fan base, a thing we never expected. The Innus and Naskapis, in particular, have taken an interest in our game, and so has the occasional French Canadian family we run into.

The kids really love it in particular. Most of the time, our game is a pretty tough sell to any spectator, since it's really just a bunch of folks hiking in football uniforms. But once a week -- and I insisted on Saturdays -- we hold a "lateral day."

Remember, we can't down the ball. This ball has been live for three years. If we downed it, the REDBLACKS would be over one million yards offsides. We'd have to snap the ball, accept the offside penalty, step five yards forward, and repeat. Given all the land ahead, we'd have to do that about 180,000 times. No fun.

Our solution, then, is to just play backwards on Saturday, since every backwards lateral remains a live ball. Sometimes we'll play a full game-within-a-game. But sometimes we'll do "stunt days." Those are the real crowd-pleasers.

Dante Hall. You picked one Hell of a mountain, T. Just getting up here has got me gassed. I'm a 44-year-old man. What are you tryin' to do to me?

Tim Tebow. I think it's gonna be worth it. So what's the setup?

Hall. Down on the lake, we've got a canoe we've marked with a sign. Here, take the binoculars. You see it?

Tebow. ... yeah, there it is. Wow.

Hall. Too far?

Tebow. Nah, I don't think so. I don't think I've ever tried one this far. Bet I can hit it, though.

Hall. What's the ball setup?

Tebow. Full house. Weights all the way through the ball and the jav. I've gotta be able to cut through the wind. Everybody ready down there?

Hall. Oh yeah. Must be a couple hundred people.

Tebow. All right.

I pace back and forth on a little runway I've cleared for myself, kicking away the last few pebbles and twigs. My cleats are clean on the bottom. The ball feels good.

I take a running start, time my breaths, and let it rip.

Hall. Dude. It's looking good ... oh man. Oh man.

Hall. OH SHIT!

Tebow. JACKPOT, BABY!

Hall. OHHHHHHHHHH SHIT!

Throws like this one could only be possible if you took a quarterback with this weird, janky throwing motion of mine, and then fed him through the physical conditioning corridors of the NFL, and then dropped him into northern Canada to build up years of Northern strength. This is where I am supposed to be. It's just a pity I don't have a defense to rain Hellfire on. I could take them by the hundreds.

Dante pulls me to my feet.

Hall. Tim?

Tebow. Yeah.

Hall. That is the most butt-ugly throwing motion I have ever seen.

Tebow. Praise the Lord.

* * *

NOVEMBER 2024.

There is one more reason we keep on going: pure curiosity.

We're getting worried. The airlifts have stopped. The last plane flew in from the southwest in August. We've been good with rationing, but we only have a few weeks' worth of food left. We do have some rifles, and for a time I thought about hunting, but we have a few ethical vegetarians on our roster. I will never ask them to betray their beliefs. I would sooner quit.

And that, it seems, is what we'll have to do soon. But I'm out chopping firewood, and I hear a crash about a football field away. A shipment has fallen, but from what? It's so quiet out here, especially in the cold months, that we can hear a plane coming from a couple miles away.

I see shadows, and I look up, and I'm scared stupid by this stealth plane that's hovering at maybe 50 feet over the tree line. It is completely, absolutely silent. It hangs right and pulls away.

That afternoon, we gather the crates and wheel them back to camp. The stuff in this shipment puts the CFL airlifts to shame. There's McDonald's. Oh, thank God, there's McDonald's, and by some technological marvel, it's still hot.

St-Hilaire. This tastes like shit.

Means. You kidding me? This shit is amazing.

St-Hilaire. If I'm gonna eat a bucket of salt, it'd better be some poutine or something. This has no flavor profile. It's just fat and salt. And the buns? If I ate this burger with the wrapper on, my gut wouldn't know the difference.

Tebow. Maybe it's an American thing. Like, yeah, it's gross. One time, my freshman year in Gainesville, I ate McDonald's every day for a week, and it tasted terrible in a hurry. But I think this is true for a lot of Americans: if you have McDonald's once a year? It's amazing. Best food ever.

Mitchell. Y'all can have all those Angus burger or whatever. I'm gonna kill all these Happy Meals.

Whoa, hey.

Means. What?

Mitchell. Got a James Bond toy.

Means. Lemme see the wrapper.

They made Jaden Smith the new Bond? Even now, there's no way he's old enough to be Bond ...

Y'all, look. The copyright here says it's 2046.

Tebow. Wait, there's no way.

Means. No. There's no way in Hell. The year's 2024. I'm positive.

Volquez. Guys?

Guys, look.

Nereida pulls a box out of one of the crates.

s65

Means. Sixty-five? Sixty-five seasons?

Mitchell. It's a prank. Whoever dropped those crates is fuckin' with us.

Volquez. I don't know ... if it's a prank, it's a really elaborate one. Discs are in here and everything.

Means. I don't suppose they gave us a Blu-Ray player.

Volquez. Not that I saw. Man, the back of the box has copy and everything.

"Television's most critically-acclaimed show returns for a 65th season. His conspiracy exposed, Snot Boogie is on a mission to rebuild his empire and re-take Baltimore's streets. In his way is Galactic Lord Carcetti, who has assembled an army of cyborgs en route from Alpha Centauri. Amidst this turmoil, Poot and Marlo encounter the hard truths of the retail athletic footwear industry."

Mitchell. Wait. Who was Snot Boogie?

From here forth, the airlifts continue on the same schedule the CFL shipments arrived. Occasionally we'll find another impossible oddity: a Home Improvement: The Next Generation T-shirt, or a Law and Order: Macon box set.

Someone knows we are out here. And that someone has answers.

* * *

AUGUST 2025.

The other night, we threw a birthday party for our play. The ball has been live for five years now. Man, and we're all getting so old. I just turned 38, Dante's about to be 47, Nate is 53. Even St-Hilaire, the kid, is in her thirties now.

Every night, we tie a rope to the ball and hang it from a tree branch to make sure it stays alive. We take turns keeping watch at night, just to make sure bears and the like don't come sniffing around. Tonight it's Nate's turn. I'm pretty sure he just pulls out a lawn chair and sleeps in it.

I'm woken up by a commotion outside my tent. Nate is catching his breath, doubled over. The ball, thank God, is still up there hanging from the branch, but it's swinging.

Tebow. What happened? What's going on?

Means. This dude. This dude went for the ball. I don't know where he came from.

He points to a man on the ground who pretty clearly just got all his wind knocked out of him. He's wearing blue, and red, and white ...

Oh my Lord. It's him.

Nate has just thrown the block of his life: clean, head-on, devastating, and of historical importance. At 5'10 and 250 pounds, he's always reminded me more of a blocking back anyway.

But right now, I'm staring at this man. The one I've seen in my dreams. He coughs and rises to his feet.

Tebow. Who ... who are you?

Troy Smith, quarterback, Montreal Alouettes. You shouldn't have to ask that.

He cackles and rasps as he speaks.

Troy. I am here to claim possession of this ball for Montreal.

Tebow. What? You can't do that.

Means. Actually, he can, technically. Bound-for-street rules allow a team to act as a third party and make a play for the ball.

But you're out of luck, Smith. There's a lot of us, and one of you.

Troy. There's still time for you to all to run. Go home to your American football, or the pathetic excuse for it these days.

Means. Run from what?

Troy. My army is behind me. Yessss ... my army is coming. You will hand me the ball now, or you will be trampled underfoot.

Tebow. The army ... I've seen the army. I've seen it. What he's saying, it's true.

And it's a legal army. CFL teams normally fields rosters of normal sizes. But years ago, in the interests of keeping it a Canadian game, the league implemented what is known as the "import rule." A team isn't allowed to field more than 20 players from other countries.

There are no such roster limits for Canadian players. Troy has built a roster of ten thousand players. These are surely the last hours. I turn to Nate, and worry is all over his face.

* * *

Troy won't stop making plays at the ball; whenever we've sent him to the turf, he's simply gotten back up and tried again. We finally grab some rope and tie him up. The CFL doesn't have a rule against that, although we have to check to be sure.

He defiantly spits on the ground.

Troy. The Toronto Argonauts have had their time. Untie me, present me with the ball, and accept your fate!

Hall. Shut up.

Troy. Ten thousand men are at my back. They will soon be here. It will be a new golden age of football. We will remember what you have done, but it is over for you.

He stays that way, struggling in his ropes and insisting upon his army, until about noon the next day.

Troy. You have seen it, yes, Gainesville? You have seen it in your dreams?

Tebow. I ... have ... I don't know how.

Troy. I stood upon the cross, at the top of Mont-Royal, an ocean of Alouettes below me. They could not all fit in Molson Stadium, and so they spilled into the lots and streets ... yes ...

Means. Well, they sure are taking their time.

Troy. Ah ha ha. Do not worry. I blew upon my horn and cried, "Blitz to the north!" And then I ran, certain of my possession and of your fumble.

St-Hilaire. North?

Troy. Yes. North.

St-Hilaire. You aren't from Montreal, are you?

Troy. No.

St-Hilaire. And ... your players are all non-imports, right? Montrealers?

Troy. Of course. Delightful people.

I look over at St-Hilaire, and she's grinning. Uh-ohhhhh.

St-Hilaire. Magnetic north or Montreal-north?

Troy. What nonsense are you speaking of?

St-Hilaire. They're not the same thing. If you're a Montrealer, west is the mountain. East is Stade Olympique. South is the Saint-Laurent. So you figure out where North is.

Troy. Lies! Lies!

St-Hilaire. Here. I'll prove it. Let me get my maps.

Hall. Oh ... my ... God. They went west.

Means. They're in Edmonton by now.

Good guess, Nate. They are, indeed, just outside of Edmonton, Alberta. By land, they're over two thousand miles away from us, and marching further in the wrong direction.

Troy stares at the map in silence for a long few moments. And then:

Troy. ...

Fuck! Why is it like that?

St-Hilaire. I don't really know.

Tebow. So wait, it's not some weird Groundhog Day kind of tradition where it's a joke, and nobody believes it. This is real?

St-Hilaire. Yep. If a Montreal cop gets a radio dispatch to head north? She goes Montreal-north. If you tell a Montrealer to go north, that's what you get.

Troy. This is bullshit. This is seriously so much bullshit.

Ahhhhhhhh this is so stupid.

Another long silence.

St-Hilaire. So ... you never checked to see if they were behind you? You never looked back?

Troy. I try not to.

Means. You gotta be able to read your offense if you're going to succeed in this league.

Troy. That has always been a problem for me.

* * *

We let Troy loose. Before he does, he and I take a walk through the trees.

Troy. You know, I did get my hands on that ball. If a third team touches the ball in bound-for-street play, the offside rule goes out the window. You don't have to worry about the REDBLACKS being offside anymore. Down the ball wherever you'd like.

Tebow. Thank you.

I knew you were coming. I had dreams.

Troy. I know. A Heisman winner can always sense the presence of another Heisman winner. The stink is all over us. That is how I found you.

We Heismen are a wayward collective. You were the fourth Heisman Trophy winner in 10 years to play in the CFL. For a moment in time, we're the most celebrated players in America, and then we tend to drift to the north. I don't know why.

Tebow. I'm glad I did.

Troy. What has kept you going? It's rough up here. Why didn't you quit years ago?

Tebow. When I look back on everything I've seen, I can't help but believe that ... this is my purpose. It makes no sense that a throwing motion that works so devastatingly well in college football is suddenly worthless in the pros. It's like when God was making me, He gave me that weird throw to make sure I'd never end up in the NFL. Like a stopper or something.

It's odd to play the greatest football in the history of the sport, and for almost nobody to see.

Troy. l should tell you something. If I could have taken that ball, the line of scrimmage would have been reset in a different direction, according to the angle of the field in Molson Stadium.

Do you know where that would have taken me? Us?

I try to remember what I saw in my dreams. Molson Stadium rested against the side of the mountain at an angle ... the Alouettes' end zone is at the north ... that would have taken us ...

Tebow. Home.

Troy. And now you understand why I wanted it so badly.

I can't keep myself from wondering what might have been if it were different. If the Rogers Centre field was tilted just a little differently.

Troy. It would have been spectacular. That path would have taken us through New York, down the Atlantic coastline, through Charleston, into Florida if my army and I could get that far. Maybe the NFL would join its teams together into its own army. It would have been the greatest game ever played.

Tebow. And instead I'm up here, where the dirt freezes.

Troy. Cherish this, Tim. I have been in the dark, chasing you for years. But even before I left, things were changing. When we get back home, I fear that American football will have become something neither of us will recognize.

Tebow. What do you mean?

Troy. Don't worry about it right now. You're close to the end zone. Finish this, and cherish every minute of it.

The next morning, we offer him our supplies. He chooses some cans of Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants beans, an I Love You, Man, backpack, and a pair School for Scoundrels snowshoes. Troy Smith goes home without an army.

* * *

JULY 2026.

We are nearly out of land. It would be nice, I think, if they would have painted the last few miles like a giant end zone, but they haven't. Toward the end, we cross the Quebec border and enter the northern sliver of Newfoundland. I guess that will have to do for a goal line.

There is no one to cheer us on in these final days. When we score our touchdown, there will be no scorekeeper. No one will see us score the grandest goal in the history of sports.

Volquez. But I guess this game isn't really about that, is it?

Tebow. I guess not.

Volquez. We're players, but we're also spectators to all this wonder. The cities, the valleys, the ancient crater. And these mountains. They're gorgeous.

We're marching through the Torngat Mountains, which are as great of a geologic reward as we could ask for. The views are stunning. I could paint them a thousand times. As we reach the foot of the final mountain, we can smell the ocean. This is it.

Means. Figure we can dip our feet in the water for a minute. That ought to count as a touchdown.

Tebow. Suppose so.

Means. This is a national park, so I figure there are ranger stations around here. Guess we can ask them from a ride back.

Tebow. What are you gonna do? When you go home?

Means. I might coach somewhere. I think I'd be good at it.

Tebow. You'd be outstanding.

I don't say much else on our way up this very last mountain. I'm excited, heartbroken, proud. At least, I tell myself, I'll have one last view. One ocean of an end zone that stretches forever.

The last steps. We begin to see the water over the mountain's peak. Freddie is a few steps ahead.

Mitchell. Timmy.

Timmy!

Tebow. What?

Mitchell. Look.

And so I look:

Music: "Kolnidur" by Jónsi
Chapter Five →

Chapter V

Natrone Means.

The ship was the point of the whole story. The Argonauts themselves were named after the ship, the Argo. That's how they sailed to Colchis.

Tim Tebow.

What was Colchis again?

Means.

That was the place where, among other things, they punished Prometheus for showing humankind the secret of fire. They chained him up and an eagle ate his guts.

These Greek myths are confusing as Hell. People can't even agree on what the story actually is. For a long time, they thought that the Argo was actually the Ark. Like, Noah's Ark.

Tebow.

... Whoa. In a way, that would make a lot of sense. We brought this thing onto the Argo ...

Means.

... and then, everything like it disappeared.

* * *

JULY 2026.

Dante Hall. It says 585 A.D. Y'all, why does it say 585 A.D.?

Freddie Mitchell. I think we're gettin' messed with some more. When's the last time Canada needed an aircraft carrier? They probably borrowed it from the Navy, stuck some Argonauts shit on it, and sailed it here.

Nereida Volquez. Who's the "they," though? Besides, Canada doesn't even have aircraft carriers anymore. At least they didn't.

Hall. So ... Tim? What do we do?

I don't know. I'm lost in a daydream. I think I'm in Tampa, in the suburbs somewhere.  I'm in a big stucco building, holding a red plastic basket. It looks like I've put a vacuum-sealed steak in the basket, and now I'm looking up and reaching for a button-down shirt. Meat and shirts in the same basket. Build a statue of me, just as I am right now, with this basket of meat and shirts. I am a monument to the trucking industry, supercenters, and the failure of urban planning. Build me out of the particle board they used to make the desk hutch in Home & Office Solutions. I will stand until the end of time. The termites will taste me and retch.

Hall. I mean, we were only gonna stop here because you can't play football in the ocean. But we can play on that thing.

Means. They're obviously expecting us. I mean, look at the maps. It's sitting in precisely the right place. Maybe they want to take us somewhere. If they kept on our path, they'd take us to ... Greenland, I think. What's in Greenland?

I used to stare at maps all day when I was a kid. I liked to look at the Philippines a lot -- my parents would tell me stories of the place, of course, but I found that looking at all the little islands and cities helped me to establish a more personal relationship with a birthplace I did not remember. But I also liked to look at Greenland. It was special to me, because it was the only actual country that got to show up as a different color. It was always white in all the atlases. I thought that was neat, and I thought it was strange that a place so unique, and so dang big, wasn't ever talked about.

Tebow. Pack up. We're going onboard.

* * *

Everything's unlocked, and ... nobody's here. We've spent all afternoon pacing through the control tower, flight deck, and corridors below. The ship is abandoned.

There is, though, electricity. Aside from the supply planes, we hadn't seen anything electric in a decade, not even so much as a flashlight. It feels like the first cup of coffee you had, just phenomenal. What we used to take for granted, we're now taking in with a primal sort of wonder.

Maryse St-Hilaire. Ooh! Ooh. Let me try.

Freddie Mitchell. OK, your turn. Just flip the switch up and down.

St-Hilaire. The light is open! Now the light is closed! Now it's open! Now it's closed!

Mitchell. Ha! Look at that shit! Peew, peew, peew!

Means. This shit is awesome.

Nereida Volquez. Wait, did you mean to say "turn on" and "turn off"?

St-Hilaire. What?

Ceiling fans are turning, refrigerators are humming, computer screens are flickering. It's all spectacular.

Sooner or later, we find the control room.

Hall. My God. Look at that. This thing went all over the world a thousand years ago.

Means. If you choose to believe any of this shit.

Hall. Whether it's real or not doesn't really matter to me. Just think about it. Just imagine an aircraft carrier bumming around the oceans in Medieval times. Like, how?

Means. Well, it matters to me, and I think this is the most elaborate work of all time. It's cute of them to do all this, whoever the "them" is.

What I'm wondering is, what are we supposed to do on a docked carrier? We can advance the line of scrimmage to the ship's bow. Then what? Timmy, you know how to sail this thing?

Tebow. No idea.

He's right, though. The drive is clearly not supposed to end here. Upfield, always upfield. Someone must captain the Argo.

Tebow. Listen up, y'all. Can we figure this out?

There's some hesitation, and then Peterson speaks up. Dang, this might be the first time he's said anything in two years.

Todd Peterson, placekicker, Toronto Argonauts. Um.

Tebow. Yeah?

Peterson. Me, maybe. I played for Navy. Spent a couple years in the Naval Academy back home.

Volquez. Todd! You beautiful bastard!

Peterson. I can take a look. That's all I can promise.

Tebow. Tomorrow, you and I meet back here. The rest of y'all, too. We'll figure this thing out. But right now, I've got an actual, honest-to-God bed to sleep in.

Todd Peterson, placekicker, Toronto Argonauts. Age 56. Has played professional football for 33 seasons. Has spent the last 13 of those seasons without playing so much as a single snap.

Sometimes, over those years, I'd look over and see a guy without a purpose. He was too proud to let anyone know he was troubled in that way, but it couldn't help but spill out of him sometimes. And in those moments I felt like the Lord was telling me, "Hey. See how he's doing. Don't let your brother suffer like this." And I'd try, but he always just laughed it off. I felt terrible for him.

Tonight, my heart just bursts with happiness for this fella. I'm probably smiling when I stagger to a random bunk below decks and hit the sack. My pads are still on, and I don't care. It's a bed. Not a sleeping bag, not a tent floor with a rock, invariably, digging at my back. A real bed. I sleep how I have never slept.

And I dream what I have never dreamed.

I wake up with absolutely no idea. Usually my dreams involve a person, or something happening. This was just ancient silence.

* * *

Hall. Morning, y'all! Coffee's on.

Mitchell. We got toilets! Can you guys believe we have toilets? I don't know the last time I took a civilized shit.

Volquez. Me neither. I just took a big ol' shit.

Mitchell. Me too.

Volquez. No, but mine was like ... by the time I got done with it, the toilet looked like that fuckin' snake pit Indiana Jones fell into.

St-Hilaire. That's gross.

Mitchell. My ass was a pasta machine, basically.

St-Hilaire. Y'all are gross.

Hall. You said "y'all!"

St-Hilaire. It makes sense. English really needs a second-person plural expression.

Hall. How do you say "y'all" in French?

St-Hilaire. We don't, because we are a singular entity, and we will one day destroy all of you, and your bathroom humor with it. Anyway. I'm gonna go take a walk.

Volquez. Hey. Hey, M.

St-Hilaire. What?

Volquez. Got a question for you.

St-Hilaire. Yes, what?

Volquez. You, uh ...

you goin' to the poop deck?

St-Hilaire. Fuck all y'all.

This might be the best coffee I've ever had. Maybe it's just because I'm drinking it out of a mug. It's the first time I've drank from a cup in over a decade.

The ship's intercom crackles to life.

Peterson. Hey, Tim. Head on over to the control room, if you would. Found something kind of wild.

I've been in the Argo for, I don't know, 14 hours. I already want this to be my home. Back in Toronto I hated how my cleats clacked against the asphalt, but now they're echoing up and down every corridor, and I love it. I've been gone a long time.

Todd is leaning over one of the control panels. There are computers and valve wheels and gauges and switches all over the place. If he can understand even one percent of this, it's a miracle.

Peterson. First off. Two years of studying in Annapolis is nowhere near enough to fully operate a ship like this. I'd need about a century. The happy news is that all these controls are in English.

The sad news is that I don't think I could do more than the most simple things. There's no way I can get comms online and radio anybody, the system's just way over my head. Same with sonar.

Do you believe the paint on the hull? Do you think this ship was built in the sixth century?

Tebow. Doubt it.

Peterson. I doubted it too! But ...look at this console. This switch. Anything, really. Everything's so badly oxidized. You see how it's stained here? Plain old air does this, if you give it enough time.

I'm gonna put it this way: if this is a hoax, and this ship was built, say, a few years ago, then they built it out of pieces of metal that were already hundreds of years old. And that's even less believable.

Tebow. Lord ...

He's right. Some of the stuff here is plastic, which just stays plastic forever. But the metal components of the Argo look like your grandma's watch.

Peterson. I say this because there's one part that looks almost brand-new. There was a film of shipping plastic on it, I had to tear it off. Look over here.

It's just a plaque, set against a wall of gauges and wheels.

Peterson. I have to think that they want us to figure this out. But I've looked up and down. There are no manuals, no logs, nothing. This is the only, uh, commentary that they've left us.

It's just 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 3 around that funny-looking shape. I don't know --

Tebow. That's Colorado, Kansas and Missouri.

Peterson. Ohhhh, you're right ...

Tebow. I solved it. I know exactly what this is.

It's a reference to a day I think about all the time. I can't believe it means something to anyone but me.

The numbers are a date. November 13th, 2011. The numbers stretch from Denver to Kansas City. That day, I started for the Broncos against the Chiefs.

Peterson. The first thing I need to know is how to fire the engines. There are eight of them. It's some pretty gnarly shit ... the engines work in tandem with one another. If I don't start the precisely right combination of engines, something might blow up. Game over.

Tebow. Eight engines, you said? There are eight, and they're numbered?

Peterson. Yeah.

Tebow. Fire engines six and eight.

Peterson. Just two? You sure?

Tebow. I'm sure.

We threw the ball eight times, and ran the ball 55 times. No NFL offense had passed so little, while running so often, in a single game since the 1970s. I completed only two of those pass attempts -- the sixth one, and the eighth one.

That was a game we won.

The engine rumbles to life.

Peterson. There it goes ... these ... the pressure readings are looking good! I think this guy is stable. Tim, we did it.

Tebow. I just can't believe someone else cares about that game.

Peterson. It'll probably take this boat an hour or so to get up to speed. How fast do you wanna run with the ball?

You'd think that since I barely ever threw in that game, but we still won, I at least went wild in the ground game. Not really. I only rushed for 43 yards.

Tebow. Let's go for 43 miles per hour.

Peterson. Knots, Tim. That's pretty fast for a boat this size, but I think we can push it.

All I've got to do now is set a bearing. The way they docked this guy, we're pointing right into the rocks out there. I know they did that on purpose, we're supposed to figure out the right angle.

I could steer us out of it, but we're gonna wanna nail this bearing exactly right if we want to go where they're taking us.

Tebow. What kind of number you need?

Peterson. To juke our way around those rocks? ... I'm thinking at least 80 or 90 degrees. It's probably gonna have to be a precise number, too. Down to the one-tenth. If it's even a tenth off, with all that ocean to cover, we could miss our target by miles.

Tebow. So a passer rating, right? A number like a passer rating is what we need.

Peterson. Well, a good passer rating, yeah. But you said you went two-for-eight? Your passer rating must have been, like, 20.

Tebow. It was 102.6.

Peterson. Tim, that's impossible.

Tebow. My passer rating was 102.6 that day.

Peterson. You're shitting me.

But my God ... it fits. That bearing looks perfect.

In a life of goofy left-handed football accomplishments, I consider that game to be stranger than anything I'd ever done to that point. I necessitated the sort of lopsided pass-run imbalance that the NFL hadn't seen in over 30 years. I completed only two passes. I somehow won, and I somehow finished with a great passer rating. I played so strangely that numbers lost their meanings.

We are on our way.

* * *

Dante and I take a walk on the flight deck that night.

Hall. So, we're on a boat. Does that mean we can't down the ball?

Tebow. Nah, I don't see how we could. I don't really think a ship can count as "the ground."

What do you think's out there?

Hall. In Greenland? I've got no idea. There are probably some research bases or something. Actually, there's got to be fishing villages here and there.

Tebow. I keep trying to explain to myself why those supply planes came from the Northeast. Maybe they flew out of this ship.

Actually, while I'm at it, I keep trying to explain to myself whose ship this is. Who put the Argo there like they did. If it's designed, it has to have a designer, right? But how could it have been built that long ago? Or maybe it was just always here. And that doesn't make any sense either. Maybe it's here because it's here. That's the only thing I can state and know to be true, but it doesn't actually say anything.

Hall. I think about those wolves sometimes.

Tebow. Which ones?

Hall. All the way back in Ontario. You know, when I was picking up all those miles after catch. You remember that, right? Those two wolves were coming for me, I put a move on them, and then end up knocking heads in mid-air. Wonder if they're OK.

If they're dead, that's about the only thing I'd change about any of this. That we could piece together an offensive drive without anything dying.

Tebow. The funny thing is, man, that was 12 years ago. They're probably dead of old age.

Hall. Ha. Shit, man, we are old men. I'm 47 years old. 47! The NFL stuck a fork in me over 15 years ago. Here I am. Still out here.

Tebow. You mind taking the ball for a bit? I'm gonna walk around downstairs a while. Lots of stuff down there we haven't checked out.

Hall. Sure. C'mere, fella ... damn, how have you been loading this thing? It weighs a ton.

Tebow. Don't forget to burp it.

The fluorescence of the lights in the lower decks continues to delight me, even if some of the rods pop and flicker. This ship is massive, and most of its rooms are entirely silent. It's a good place for a man to take a walk and --

I hear something. Music. It's echoing from somewhere deep within the stern of the ship. I thought everybody was up in the officers' quarters. My pace quickens.

It's country gospel music, and I'm sure I've heard this voice before. I make my way through the corridors, and make one last turn into a mess hall. There's this ... kid.

He's in full pads, cooking something over a stove, and he doesn't know I'm here. The music's playing out of a turntable. I sneak over and pick up a record that's sitting on the counter.

Tebow. Johnny Manziel?

The kid turns around and jumps a foot and a half, knocking a half-dozen bags of spices to the floor as he does.

Kid. Oh shit. Oh shit!

Tebow. Johnny Manziel's making country music now?

Kid. Y-yessir. He couldn't, uh, couldn't find work in the NFL ... I'm sorry, sir.

Tebow. Sorry for what?

Kid. I'm on your ship, sir. I was -- I didn't think you folks would come all the way back here.

Tebow. Calm down, buddy. We're all friendly. What's your name?

Kid. I uh, I don't know if you remember me. From Toronto.

I do remember him. I signed his autograph, 12 years ago. He said he was going to be as big as Natrone Means. Well, that clearly didn't work out. His uniform looks two sizes too big for him, and he looks terrified of me.

Tebow. What are you so nervous about? Are you lost?

Kid. No.

Tebow. Can I ask what you're doing here?

Kid. Please don't be mad at me. Promise not to be mad.

* * *

In 1982, Nova Scotia was awarded its first CFL franchise, the Atlantic Schooners. They designed uniforms, hired a coach, and bought the New England Patriots' old scoreboard, but they couldn't secure financing for a stadium. After missing deadlines set by the league, the Schooners dissolved before they could ever play a game.

It was an awful blow to the people of the Maritimes, who love sports but are too often forgotten by the rest of the world -- consider that although they share a border with the United States, we tend to know nothing about them. They suffered further indignity when, in the 1990s, the CFL expanded their league to the United States. The league founded new teams in Las Vegas, Baltimore, and even Shreveport, Louisiana.

Maritimers could do nothing but watch on television as the Las Vegas Posse grabbed a lounge singer from a nearby casino and told him to sing the Canadian national anthem. He did not know the melody, and butchered it horribly.

Their anger and heartbreak of the Maritimes is so easy to understand. Their efforts to land a professional football team have persisted. Decades later, there are legions of fans of the Atlantic Schooners, a team that never won or lost or played a game. Time and again, they have failed over the last 50 years to put a team on the field though conventional means.

The Toronto Argonauts stand as their last, and best, opportunity.

Although Canada has largely been without modern communications for the last decade, word has spread of our adventures in the North. Many are awestruck, and many have dismissed our drive as fable. Still others have seen opportunity. After the Montreal Alouettes' infamous failure to steal possession of the ball, Nova Scotia was inspired to knock it loose. They mean to take the ball, thereby establishing themselves as a CFL team by default.

The Nova Scotians are a people of the sea, famous for fishing and shipbuilding. This spells doom for a single team in the middle of the sea who can barely sail their own boat.

Tebow. And you're an Atlantic Schooner.

Kid. Yessir. Couple years ago, we found this ship docked here and figured out it was right along your path. So they told me to put on my pads and hide out in here, and get on the radio if you guys ever made it here.

Tebow. And you did that?

Kid. Yessir, I did. They're sailing right toward us. They're coming to force a fumble. Mr. Tebow, I feel terrible.

Tebow. How many are coming?

Kid. A lot.

Tebow. How many is a lot? A hundred?

Kid. Everybody.

They're sending them all. War vessels, fishing boats, tankers, yachts, riverboats. Everything they have. They are sending them all.

I run to the nearest intercom.

Tebow. Todd. You there?

Peterson. Yeah.

Tebow. Give the engines everything you got. We've got pirates on the way.

Peterson. Are you sure? Wait. Pirates?

Tebow. No questions. Haul ass.

* * *

We're up on the control tower. I hand Nate the binoculars.

Tebow. Look.

Means. Where are ... oh no. Yeah, I see them.

Hall. How many do you count?

Means. Hundreds ... no, I think thousands is the word.

Volquez. Kid, what did you do?

The kid is trying to hold back tears, and not doing it very well.

Kid. You were my favorite player. I'm sorry. I just ... I wanted to play.

Volquez. Well, you're playing now. Hope you're happy.

Kid. You stole it! You stole our football. When you went bound-for-street, what do you think the rest of the CFL did? We're still waiting to start the 2014 playoffs. We can't do it until standings are final for every team.

This was my only chance to play.

I never imagined that. I always thought they would simply play on without us. Perfectionists, these Canadians.

Tebow. No, kid ... I'm sorry. I never meant to take it away. Taking away the game is a terrible thing to do to a young man. It hurts me to know that.

For now, we've got yards to gain. You should go.

I tuck the ball in one arm, and I embrace him with the other. He sniffles, trudges down to the flight deck, and dutifully holds in a three-point stance at the ship's bow. It is the worst tackle attempt I have ever received.

Peterson. I'm thinking they get here within the hour. I've punched it as hard as I can, but we're still probably eight hours away from land, near as I can figure.

Tebow. All right. Huddle up everybody.

When they board us -- and they're gonna board us -- we're gonna run misdirections, hook-and-laterals, whatever we can to keep the play alive. When we get to land, we'll disembark and try to run upfield however we can.

This is the Argo. We do not give up the ball on our own ship.

* * *

These are not the Alouette Wars. I had hoped against hope that the Nova Scotians would somehow lose their way, that we'd be able to somehow elude them, but the Maritimers are expert sailors. They are here, both in their sheer enormity, and their variety. There are battleships. Cruise ships. Riverboats. Scatterings of little motorboats. Yachts. Even wooden privateer ships from centuries ago, and triremes of the ancient Phoenicians, which they might have just built out of boredom.

Natrone Means.

Where we at, Tim?

Tim Tebow.

I was just about to write about the part where the pirates board the Argo.

Means.

Hoo man. What a clusterfuck that day was.

Tebow.

You know something? I bet this would make a great video game. Like, all of this. They've already got tons of video games with these huge open worlds, right? Well, just take one of those and drop in a bunch of football players and a ball. You wouldn't need get any league licenses or anything like that. Someone should do that.

Means.

Have you tried to talk to anybody about that?

Tebow.

No. Hey, if I end up showing this to anybody? If anyone reads this who's in the video game industry? Seriously, holler at me. It'd be incredible.

Anyway, had a question for you, Nate. You told me once that the day they boarded the Argo reminded you of a board game. Which game were you talking about?

Means.

I don't know if you've ever played Go. It's this ancient Chinese game that looks really simple. You and your opponent take turns placing your pieces on a board, and the goal is to make your pieces completely surround your opponent's pieces. You kind of make a box around them, kind of like capturing them, I guess.

Tebow.

That's pretty much what we did, yeah. Todd had been fooling around with the ship's systems, and he figured out how to seal the ship's compartments. And then Ne was like, "Hey, we can use this. Canadians don't use locks, the concept is totally foreign to us. We can lure them into the ship, throw down the doors, and trap them."

Means.

I really didn't think it would work. But it worked.

You were up in the comms tower, calling plays through the intercom. Me and Ne would position ourselves at opposite ends of a compartment. Dante would run with the ball and try to draw them in. And then, bam. We were catching a couple hundred of them at a time. Just like little pieces on a Go board.

Before long, more of the Schooners managed to throw ladders on our deck, and they were coming in from different angles. I think it was about eight in the morning ... Ne and I were manning the doors in one of the mess halls. Dante comes running through, but he's like, "Wait. Don't shut the doors yet. I've got two groups behind me, but there's a third one. I wanna tie up all three."

So he runs off, jukes up and down the ship for a few minutes, and gets them to bite. Then he runs through, they run in behind him, and we slam the doors shut.

And man, that's Dante for you, isn't it? Sometimes he'll turn down the easy play, and you're like, "No, Dante! Damn it! What are you doing?" Then you realize he's the only one out there who really knows what's up.

Tebow.

Ha. Yeah. That is definitely not the play I called. But it worked, man. Sometimes you just have to let a guy like that do his thing.

So by noon, we'd pulled this mess so many times we were running out of space.

Means.

What they really needed to do was just bum-rush us with a couple thousand of their players at a time, but we were moving at, what, 40 knots? At that speed, they couldn't get that many people onboard that quickly. Finally, a group climbs on, and they get smart.

Dante's standing there, waiting for them to take the bait, but suddenly they drop down into the lower decks. And we're like, "What the Hell is going on?" Well, they're headed for the engine room. They can't blitz us unless they can stop our ship, and that's exactly what they're gonna do.

Once we figure out what they're doing, we all meet back up at the control tower. The Schooners are going to manually override the engines down there, and there's nothing Todd can do about it from up here. We figure they're gonna bring us to a stop so they can board us and blitz us by the thousands.

I remember telling you, "Timmy, this is it. We can't down the ball, we're on the sea. They will come at you until they have that ball. Just save yourself the hurt. Drop it on the middle of the deck and walk away."

Tebow.

I just couldn't do that. This was the first time I really, truly thought our drive was toast. You were all telling me to just fumble it. It's like asking a tree to walk. I was not capable of doing anything other than what a football player would do.

Means.

I wanted to take the ball for you, and you wouldn't let me. I'll always remember that.

But then I look out the window and I see that the Schooners' fleets are all peeling off us. They're speeding way ahead of us, towards Greenland. All of a sudden, we don't know what they're doing.

That's when I feel it. The ship, which is already going 40 knots or so, lurches forward.

Tebow.

They're not shutting down the engines.

Means.

Nope.

They're speeding up.

Happy painting, Timmy. This one should be fun.

* * *

I look down at the console. We're at 90 knots.

Ever since I was a kid, they kept telling me to slide when a hit was coming.

I never knew how to do anything but tuck in and put my shoulders down. It's what I know how to do. Hit.

It doesn't hurt so bad, really. The Argo takes a full spin across the permafrost, but there's a lot of give. It's like taking a ride on a steak knife. We spin back around until our bow is to the Northeast, and rest to a halt.

Volquez. There they are. Look, they're coming over the mountains. They were waiting.

Mitchell. This is it.

Tebow. I'm so sorry, y'all. I wanted so badly to lead us to the ... to score a ...

Wait, what did I want to do?

Volquez. I don't know if it's about wanting to. It's just about doing. We said "just keep moving," and we did.

We're football players. Tiny little specks. But we're the tiny little specks who conquered everything we could.

My eyes have spent the last 12 years looking a hundred feet, a thousand feet, a mile away. I wonder whether I'll be able to read a cereal box. My driver's license is expired. What do I do for a living? Where do I live? My Toyota's been sitting there all this time. I bet the fuel tank's rusted out or something. I don't want to go.

I don't want to go.

Fans in the control room start to whir. Fax machines are lighting up.

Means. What the Hell?

Peterson. I don't know. I tried to get comms online for hours. I don't get this.

The machines are spitting out pages to the floor by the dozen. They all say the same thing.

Tebow. This has gotta be them, right?  Whoever gave us this ship?

Means. Even if it is, it doesn't make any sense. First off, the ball's live. The line of scrimmage is all the way back in Quebec, remember? We can't throw a forward pass.

St-Hilaire. Wait. That's not true. We ran aground. We can down it now, move the line of scrimmage up here, then drop back and throw.

Means. That's ... that's true. But we can't just throw to anybody who sends us a fax. They've got to be eligible receivers.

I look upfield. The Schooners will be on us in five minutes.

And then, another pile of faxes shoot out.

Means. Wait ...

Nate pulls a tattered rule book out of his pack.

Means. Rule 1,546, section 9,933, clause VIII-(a).

"Bound-for-street play.

A Player shall be considered an eligible receiver for the duration of his or her life if he or she has ever performed under the employ of the Team."

Tebow. Keep going.

Means. "If the Player wishes to ... man, nobody is going to read 250,000 pages of rules, nobody's ever going to go bound-for-street anyway, why did I choose rulebook copy as a career, I hate my ... "

OK, it kinda ... trails off there. But the important thing is that it's conceivable that an eligible receiver is out there. Maybe a retired Argonaut.

Volquez. Schooners are everywhere, though. An open target would have to be miles and miles off.

Tebow. Yeah. I can't throw quite that far.

Mitchell. Well, Hell, y'all, we're on an aircraft carrier. Guns and shit everywhere. Can we shoot the ball out of one of those?

Peterson. No dice on that. They're built for a specific ordnance. If there even was some way to fix that up, it would take days. We've only got a few minutes.

Tebow. I don't suppose anyone knows how to fly one of those planes downstairs.

Nobody does.

Peterson. The catapult.

Means. What?

Peterson. The aircraft catapult on the deck. They use it to launch planes on a short runway. If it can throw a fighter jet into the air, I don't even know how far a football would go. I bet I could just stick a hook into the end of the jav.

Means. That ball might completely disintegrate.

Tebow. But if it doesn't? It would actually work?

Peterson. Sure. I've got to get the steam engines started up, but --

Tebow. Now. Go now.

* * *

Dante and Freddie are running go routes toward the bow of the ship. They're a diversion, just an attempt to get some of Nova Scotia's defense to peel off and chase after them. Todd's firing up the mechanism below decks, in the catapult's engine chamber.  St-Hilaire is making adjustments to the ball with a buck knife and some rope so that it hitches to the catapult. I'm up in the control tower, ready to punch the button.

And down on the deck, offering protection on the ball, are my running backs, Natrone Means and Nereida Volquez. "Thunder and Lightning," they were called, back when there was actually a stadium full of people to see them. Nate would rumble ahead on the third-and-ones, while Ne would brandish the ball jav-out and go berzerk on the defensive line. I wish I could have seen them play before I came up here and broke everything.

The Maritimers have found an ice shelf that rests right against the hull of the ship. I grab the radio.

Tebow. How much longer, Todd?

Peterson. A minute. Ninety seconds, maybe. Engines are almost there.

Tebow. They're climbing the boat.

Peterson. Best I can do without blowing myself to Hell. Does Maryse have the ball set up?

Tebow. She's ... yeah. She's giving me the thumbs-up.

Peterson. All right. Standby.

In the end, in the most important play of their lives, at the moment they become legends, Means and Volquez are blocking backs. They're blocking for me, and they're giving them all the Hell they've got.

The Schooner brushes away some broken glass and rises to his feet.

Schooner. Hello.

Tebow. Are you all right?

Schooner. Yeah, I'm fine. I like your control tower. Lots of knobs and switches and stuff. Pretty neat!

Tebow. Yeah, it's neat.

Schooner. Gee whiz, look at the view up here, too. You can actually see Greenland ... ouch. Actually, you really can't. It's too bright.

Tebow. That's snow blindness. I can't see anything out there either.

We've got some snow goggles down in one of the supply rooms, I think.

Peterson. Thirty seconds, Timmy.

Tebow. Roger that.

Schooner. What I don't get is, why do they call it Greenland when it's the only country on the map that doesn't show up green?

Tebow. I'm kind of busy right now.

Schooner. Greenland and Iceland should basically just switch names. They touched on this issue in the second Mighty Ducks film, but only briefly in conversation. I wish they would have explored the issue further in the third Mighty Ducks film, but they didn't. Maybe in the fourth one they --

Tebow. Please be quiet.

Now the Schooners are running up the deck in triple-digit formations. Nate and Ne can't hold them off much longer.

I'm thinking about the ball. It's the same ball we've used for 12 years. I've scraped it against asphalt, cracked it open, left it to bake in the heat, left it to freeze in the snow, and we've smashed it against a hundred face masks, and I've thrown it off buildings and into lakes. The nature of this ball, with its precisely variable weight and the counter-balance of its javelin, has changed the course of my life. It is God's gift to me, and if, by feeding it into this machine, I destroy it, I will feel like I have lost a friend.

But if any ball can survive such a thing, it is this ball. Strap in tight, buddy.

Peterson. Engines up, captain.

Tebow. FIRE!

Peterson. You don't have to say "fire." Just push the button.

Tebow. Oh, right.

KA-CHUNNNNNNKK.

Schooner. Well, crud. Where did you throw it?

Tebow. I don't know.

Schooner. Who did you throw it to?

Tebow. I don't know.

Schooner. Are you allowed to throw it if there isn't an intended receiver?

Tebow. Sure there is. I intend for there to be a receiver.

I push past a flood of disappointed Nova Scotians to get to my team. We embrace, although we don't know what, exactly, we're celebrating.

Hall. Some of the Schooners are gonna run upfield with us. Not a lot we can do about that, really. But you figure, whoever planned all this has a plan for that, too.

Tebow. Always does.

Means. I ran inventory yesterday. We've got snowshoes and goggles below decks. Hey, guess we can let all those guys loose down there, too.

One day, those players will write an oral history of what it was like to go inside of a room, only to be sealed inside with doors, thereby losing one's autonomy to go wherever they would like. It will dominate the Canadian dialogue for months, and sell tens of millions of copies.

* * *

The Battle of the Argo was waged on the sea, and then to land. And since the ball isn't secured, it is not yet over.

Volquez. If this is an incomplete pass, I'm gonna be pissed as Hell.

We snap on our snow goggles and look up. And for the first time, we can see what is there.

Means. Oh my holy God.

St-Hilaire. What ... is that thing? It's too big to be anything.

Mitchell. Are we in Heaven?

Timmy, are we in Heaven?

Tebow. No.

It's the most enormous thing I have ever seen.

Tebow. It's too cold to be Heaven.

I cannot tell you about it, reader, until you see it for yourself.

Music: "Snowbound" by Donald Fagen Chapter Six →

Chapter VI

I don't know what's more wondrous: that Greenland City exists, or that it can be allowed to exist, undisturbed and unseen by the rest of humankind, for so long.

Nobody ever ventures deep into Greenland, and none of us wonder what is there. Satellites never picked up its buildings, which were all uniformly alabaster white; that, of course, is no accident. The few individuals lucky enough to poke their heads out of the stratosphere -- the astronauts and spy plane pilots, in large part -- swear themselves to secrecy, because they know that it is only because of the City that they can reach such altitudes at all.

Ricky Williams, retired Toronto Argonauts running back:

Ooh, I like that view. I always thought the City looked best from far out.

Tim Tebow:

So, how did y'all catch my throw?

Ricky Williams, retired Toronto Argonauts running back:

Well, let me back up. We knew for years that you guys were headed our way. As luck would have it, one of our carriers was called the Argo. It sailed all around the world back in the 600s, and it had been sitting around dry-docked for over a thousand years. So we're like, well, we have to leave it out there for you guys, right? We'd been watching the Argonauts-REDBLACKS game for more than a decade. It would have been a pity to just let it end once you got to the sea.

Tebow:

You sure were cute about it.

Williams:

Ha! I am sorry about that, Timmy. I really am. I'll put it this way: back in Canada, nothing was stopping y'all from just jumping into a school bus and driving your asses upfield, right? But you didn't, because that would have been profoundly unsportsmanlike.

Same for us. We wanted to help you out, create some space for you. We just decided that handing it all to you, without making you work for it, wouldn't have been fair.

But yes, we did get cute with that 11-11-13 plaque. We went with that because that game absolutely fascinated us. You went 2-for-8 and had a passer rating of 102? Like you said, you really did break numbers that day. Our scientists studied that one game for years.

Anyway, the catch. Obviously, we couldn't just have our air force go and get the ball. Everyone involved had to be an ex-Argonaut. So that left me, Leland, and Crouchy, who were all credentialed to fly. The three of us each jumped in an aircraft, got to an altitude of 500 feet or so, and deployed a giant recovery net. Sure enough, the ball shot right into it. The jav had a little rattle in it, and some of the hide was blown off the front of the ball, but it was pretty much OK.

So you're this far along, huh? Have fun trying to explain the City. Whenever someone visits, I can never figure out where to start.

Tebow:

Thanks, Ricky. I have no idea either.

* * *

We throw on our Bebe's Kids snow suits and Mamma Mia! snowshoes and stomp upfield with a small band of Schooners in tow. We do not know what to make of this ... thing ... swallowing the horizon.

Volquez. Maybe it's some kind of ice formation?

Means. I don't know why it would be.

Volquez. That's exactly it, though. I don't know why that thing would be. I don't know why it would exist.

Means. Hard for me to get a really good grip on it visually ... but that big structure in the middle looks like it could be 10 miles tall.

It's actually about 45 miles tall, and from sea level, it reaches eight times higher than Mount Everest.

This was another thing I saw in my dreams, back on the Argo, although I couldn't quite focus on it or grasp its enormity. It was just cold, sky blue, and towers of white. It was such a simple thing, so absent of apparent purpose, that it seemed like something that could only have existed in a dream.

Tebow. Hey. I see planes. Y'all see planes?

Mitchell. Yeah ... don't hear them, though. They're like the ones that were dropping our shit in Quebec.

A few minutes later, three figures emerge from the wind and the snow.

And this is when my visions make perfect sense. There is Ricky Williams, former Toronto Argonaut, former Texas Longhorn. There is Eric Crouch, former Toronto Argonaut, former Nebraska Cornhusker. Both men won the Heisman Trophy, just as Troy Smith did, and just as I did. I sensed them, or sensed something. We are always floating north.

The third man is Leland Melvin, a man of unsurpassed talent, ambition, and wisdom. He is notable for, among many other things, being the only professional football player ever to travel into space. Drafted by the Lions in 1986, injuries ended his NFL career before he got going.

He is considered an eligible receiver by virtue of the short amount of time he spent in Argonauts training camp. Afterward, he became a researcher at NASA, worked his way up the ladder, was selected to be an astronaut, and performed multiple space missions. I never asked him, but I do wonder whether, upon failing in his quest to become an Argonaut, he simply decided to become the other -naut instead. An Argonaut and an astronaut are, or at least were, vastly different things, but that does not stop a man like Leland Melvin.

melvinpaper

Leland frowns.

Leland Melvin. Why are you wearing a Bebe's Kids snowsuit? I thought we sent you official 40th Descendants of Bebe gear.

Volquez. We're the ones with questions.

Melvin. They will be answered. Come on, we'll give you a ride to the City.

Means. So it's a city, then.

Melvin. First business, however ... you people cannot advance upfield.

He gestures toward the gang of Schooners.

Melvin. As Argonauts, we are fully eligible receivers in possession of the ball. We will not allow you to advance upfield. Our technologies are beyond anything you can behold. A moment, please.

He looks to the sky, appearing to note the precise position of the sun, and then draws a line in the snow with his walking pole.

Melvin. This, by my rough measure, is the 3,257,451-yard line. If you are an Atlantic Schooner, and you cross this line ... we will lay the wood on you.

Look over my shoulder. Cast your eyes to a city taller than the sky, and then consider whether what I am telling you is true.

Schooner. We only wanted a team. We just wanted to play.

Melvin. Indeed, and that is why we are prepared to give you something in exchange.  We are a greatly influential people, and can pull a number of strings for you.

In exchange for telling no one what you have seen today, we will arrange for the Browns to be relocated to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Is this acceptable?

The Schooners huddle up and deliberate.

Schooner. C'mon, man. Not the Browns.

Melvin. Perhaps another team, then?

Schooner. We want the Vikings.

Melvin. That is asking too much. The Vikings, for whatever they're worth, are the most valuable franchise in the NFL.

Perhaps we can arrive at an even compromise. We will give you a completely forgettable, nondescript team that is just sort of there.

Schooner. The Titans.

Melvin. Deal. Expect for the Halifax Titans to begin play in the 2028 season.

I'm happy for the Schooners. They were worthy opponents who very nearly halted the most formidable offense in the history of time. They could not stop us, but they got what they wanted. We embrace, and they trudge back to their battleships and riverboats.

Eric Crouch. As for you, fellow Argonauts. Would you like a lift?

Tebow. I don't know. It seems ... unsportsmanlike.

Crouch. Unsportsmanlike against who? You have no more opponents. You're a survivor of a shipwreck who has been attacked by legions that outnumbered your team ten thousand to one. And now you're concerned about sportsmanship?

Means. He's right, Timmy. It's not against the rules. Let's give ourselves a break.

We climb aboard their aircraft, the same shade and color as the buildings on the horizon.

Hall. Can I ask why y'all wouldn't give them the Vikings?

Crouch. They've won five of the last seven Super Bowls. Teddy Bridgewater's a god.

Tebow. Really?

Crouch. Oh yeah. Last year he passed for 8,500 yards. Sixty-eight touchdowns and, what, five interceptions? Doesn't hurt that they moved Jadeveon Clowney to tight end, either.

Tebow. Oh, no way.

Crouch. Yeah. A hundred points a game. Just blood everywhere. It's filthy.

Williams. Hey, folks. We're coming up on the City. Enjoy the view.

You'll love this place, I promise. It's a great sports town. Best fans in the world.

We choose not to sleep on this night, and the three Lost Argonauts are patient enough to stay up with us until everything is explained.

* * *

The City goes by many names, but the name in one of its native tongues is Tahimik. I heard that word all the time from my parents when I was a little kid. It is Filipino for "quiet."

As Eric said, it's one heck of a sports town, if we can generously extend "town" to describe a sprawling, futurist, alabaster-white megalopolis with hundreds of buildings that stand five miles tall, and one that stands more than 40 miles in the sky. Its permanent population is about five million, although the city's sprawl -- in three dimensions -- is so enormous that one can walk around in it and not encounter a single other soul for weeks.

Being the sports enthusiasts they are, they've watched our entire game, all 12 years of it. Thanks to their postmodern technologies, we've had a massive televised viewing audience all this time, and we didn't even know it. So that is one reason they're so excited to see us.

Another is that they see me, Tim Tebow, as a sort of native son. I was born in the Philippines, where humankind's earliest open-ocean explorers embarked to discover Polynesia. These explorers, unbeknownst to mainstream academics, had charted and mapped all of Earth by 1,000 B.C., and had founded a number of settlements along the way. There is one settlement they envisioned as a sort of great library, a place of sanctuary for all the world's knowledge. They wanted to build it in a place where no one would find it, safe from wars and politics and greed. That place was right in the middle of Greenland -- remote, massive, and geographically isolated, without the potential meddling of Antarctic explorers whose magnetic compasses pointed them there.

Around 900 B.C., they began building, learning, exploring, experimenting, discovering. And they did not stop. When the great thinkers and scientists of the world wanted to take sanctuary, they did so in the City. Consequentially, its technologies began to leapfrog the rest of the world's nations several times over. That is how they built the Argo, an aircraft carrier, in the fifth century A.D.

Consider this old photograph of a biplane flying over downtown.

That photo was taken in the year 338 A.D., well over 15 centuries before the rest of the world developed aircraft. The great men and women of science and exploration were secretly offered safe passage to the City, and once they took in its futurist wonders, they never left. The pace of mainstream humanity's mainstream scientific advances is almost nothing as compared to the explosion of enlightenment that has taken place in the middle of Greenland.

One such great scientist was Leland D. Melvin.

Tim Tebow:

How did you find out about the City?

Leland Melvin:

Well, NASA obsessively guards their knowledge of it. I flew my first mission in 2008, and even when they were strapping me into the Atlantis, they didn't tell me a thing. Later, I was doing some repairs, and I look up and see all these white spikes pointing out of Greenland. I was flipping out. I turned to the flight leader, and he nodded, and he was like, "Now you know."

Once I get back to Earth, I ask the program director about it, and he tells me he can get me there, if I want to. Hell yes, I want to. Now, it's rare for any kind of scientist to also be a retired NFL player, of course. But they're crazy about sports up here, and I'm one of the only professional athletes to ever live among them. I'm instantly a celebrity. I have the clout to do just about whatever I want.

Tebow:

Hence the Argo.

Melvin:

Yes. That's also how I brought Ricky and Eric up here. They're great thinkers, really, in their own ways.

It also explains all the stuff from the "future" that you guys kept finding in the boxes. Understand this: The City develops nearly every product in the world. Engines, computers, TV shows, whatever.

How did humankind go from the hot-air balloon to the supersonic SR-71 spy plane, which travels at Mach 3, in, what, 63 years? Do you really think a civilization of people can advance to that technology if nobody feeds it to them? Consider also that we didn't have a reliable cordless phone in 1990, and we had an iPhone in our pocket 17 years later. People accepted this as true because no other possibilities were really suggested to them. But take a step back and think, really think, about how the Hell that is possible, unless another party gives them this stuff an an accelerated rate.

That's what we did. That's what we've done for nearly 3,000 years. Every now and then, we very quietly leak a new technology to our agents in the rest of the world. That's how you got the sailing ship, the steam engine, the automobile, and the Sega Dreamcast, and that is how you will get things you can't even yet conceive of.

But not so many things. Here is the truth: we are running out of stuff.

Tebow:

How is that possible?

Melvin:

Very soon, we think, we will have cured every disease, solved every economic crisis, made every season of every TV show that anyone would conceivably want to watch. And then we'll be out of stuff. We're gonna release the greatest smartphone of all time sometime in the 2050s. That, I figure, will be the last thing.

Tebow:

I observed that. It was the bizarre thrill you get not from speed, but from a sudden stop, the moment speed disappears. When I went back home, I figured that after 12 years, there must have been all this great new stuff. Not really. Computers were the same, cars were more or less the same, we still went to the fire station to vote.

Everything we had was all we would ever have. And that's a pretty fair deal, if you ask me. I've got air conditioning and a thing in my pocket that will tell me where to get Chinese food.

And lots of people would surely say to that, "Well, what about space? What about the rest of the universe? What about quantum physics? Just go explore stuff!"

Melvin.

Mhmm. We can't.

Around the year 1500, we hit a wall. We precisely mapped every star that has ever sent light in our direction. And then we start to realize that virtually all of it is a place we can never reach.

Humankind can't travel much further than our solar system. Astral physics won't allow it. Our human bodies won't allow it. Faster-than-light travel is impossible. All the teleportation business that we keep dreaming up in movies is absolutely impossible.

We know that quantum mechanics are in motion everywhere, but around that time, we also discover that we will never be able to comprehend or explore this, either. We stubbornly fought against this truth. God, how we fought. But it was like telling yourself that if you stare at a glass of water hard enough, it'll turn into wine. We were used to running into barriers a handful of times before we figured ways around them. But at this point, we just kept on circling around and hitting our heads on the same, impenetrable wall, thousands of times, forever.

There are things we cannot do. Humankind can travel to a handful of planets so barren that we'd never want to visit them anyway. Apart from that, we are stuck here. Forever, and ever, and nothing can be done about it.

Tebow.

Y'all must have despaired.

Melvin.

We did. Well, I wasn't around yet in the 1500s, but they did. That was when they built the Telescope. They thought, "Surely, we'll take in the whole of the universe with this 40-mile-high instrument. We'll find something. A clue to take the next step, for humanity to finally move forward again."

We didn't. And now it stands as a grand monument, not of what we can accomplish, but of the vast enormity of the things that we cannot know, and never will.

Tebow.

And it's like that for a couple hundred years. And then y'all find a new purpose.

Melvin.

Sports, bruh.

Sports.

Tebow.

Heck yes. Sports.

Melvin.

Sports.

You know, when I was younger, a lot of academics back home used to turn up their noses at sports. They were lowbrow wastes of time, they said. People were too obsessed with them. The unmissable insinuation being, of course, that they themselves were up to something more important.

We are small. We are nothing. We are such nothing that the universe does not acknowledge that we are even here, and it never will. Accept that. And now, stand on this line, and look at that quarterback, and drill the fuck out of him. Nothing you do will be more important, because nothing you do will be important.

It is quite well that we love sports. Because one day, sports will be the only adventures we have left. There will be nothing else to do, and for eternity.

Humans cannot endure in a future without problems. It's not in us. Sports invent problems as nothing else can.

* * *

The next day, Leland, Ricky, and Crouchy walk us through one gleaming white corridor in a building with 10,000 corridors, in a city with 10,000 such buildings. We're just taking it all in, not saying much, except for Nate. Poor Nate. He's having trouble with this.

Means. It's impossible. There has to be more to discover, more to create.

Melvin. Well, by all means. Would you like your smartphone to have a terabyte of memory? Sure, we can do that. Do you want to go to Mars? Be our guest. You can stand there for 20 minutes and look at all the nothing, and then we'll bring you back.

Means. You just haven't tried enough. You haven't given yourselves enough time.

Melvin. Do you realize that it's been 500 years since we ran out? Do you realize how many epochs that is, by our standards? We invented the Atari 2600 on a Monday in the year 783. By Saturday, we had made the PlayStation 6. We know what it is like to discover so quickly we can barely process it.

Means has always been the dreamer, the man of science. He's carrying on as though someone has run over his dog.

Means. What about the cosmos?

Melvin. It's big. Lots of space fires and little dots. Look close at the little dots, and they're rocks with nothing on them. There are no exceptions.

Means. Think in another direction. Look for something spiritual. Look for evidence of God.

Melvin. You want to find God by looking through a telescope? You're out of luck, unless your God is a giant rock collection.

Means. Do ... from what you've seen and observed, do you think there's a God?

Melvin. Huh. Like, a real God?

I don't know. Maybe.

Volquez. He's pretty shy, if that's the case. I get that. I was shy growing up. I just wish he could have spent more time on the space part.

St-Hilaire. Maybe God just left that blank for emphasis. It was an aesthetic decision.

Volquez. So we're art? Oh no, is God an art school kid?

St-Hilaire. Is God even a man?

Volquez. I don't know, maybe not. Did we just pass the Bechdel test?

St-Hilaire. Finally. Holy shit.

Williams. Hey, my film room's up here. I wanna show y'all something, you'll get a kick out of this.

There is a Greenland Football League, although its days may be numbered. It's one of several sports that are nearing their "strategic saturation point" in Greenland. The optimal strategies of the sport are identified; in other words, the sport is "solved," and it thereby becomes less interesting. Baseball was solved in the 10th century, and they believe they're close to solving hockey. Basketball, they say, may be unsolvable.

Just recently, Ricky Williams identified a formula so revolutionary that rule changes were necessary to preserve the sport.

Williams. My research team and I spent years working on this play. It's the gold standard of trick plays, and it's a trick play that robs a defense blind. So I've called it the Golden Fleece.

Mitchell. This looks all fucked up. Where's the offensive line? Is there even an offensive line?

Williams. Not in the way you're used to thinking about an offensive line, no. In reality, there are at least a dozen offensive lines at work in this diagram, though.

Hall. How does it work?

Williams. You're only seeing a tiny sliver of the play here. To truly understand it well enough to implement it, you need to go to school for it. Like, a four-year degree. Just for this.

But it works. Believe me, if you play it right, it works every single time.

Tebow. I'm not seeing any X's. Where's the defense?

Williams. It doesn't matter. It really does not matter, which speaks to the invincibility of this play. In fact, if you and your teammates fully understand the Golden Fleece and its variations? You don't even have to run. You can just walk through the play, and you will score a touchdown every single time.

Crouch. Hey, Ricky? I think it's time to have that talk with them. Like we were talking about.

Ricky sighs and clicks the play off the screen.

Williams. All right.

Crouch. Guys, have a seat.

I know this tone of voice. It's the "we've gotta cut you, kid" voice. I don't like it.

Crouch. Do you know what's been going on back home? In the States, I mean?

Tebow. No, we've been in the dark for over a decade. We haven't heard from home at all.

Hall. Why? What happened? Was there a war or something?

Crouch. No, no, no. Nothing like that. America's fine. Or it's gonna be fine, anyway.

Means. Does this have something to do with the power crisis?

Leland steps forward. He looks as though he's trying to practice bedside manner or something.

Melvin. Yes. It does.

These are the final standings from the 2025 NFL season. Show him, Ricky.

standings

Williams. Most NFL teams went out of business years ago. The rest play on old high school fields. A game might draw 500 people, if it's a big game.

I need to find somewhere to sit.

Melvin. Some time ago, we realized that the global energy infrastructure was headed for collapse. Sources of fuel were so low that in a matter of years, we would have been looking at a massive, worldwide blackout. No communications, no transportation, no anything. Meanwhile, we had developed a technology that, once implemented, would generate all the energy humanity would ever need.

Now, please understand that we in the City are not some sort of Illuminati. We do not attempt to hold political power, we just suggest. Urge. If we see something, we say something. So we shared what we had found with the world's governments.

Most nations, like Canada, paid attention. We told them that building the infrastructure for this technology would take some time, and that's why they declared a nationwide blackout on all nonessential services. It's a happy story for Canada. They'll be back online in the near future.

But the United States ...

He takes the remote.

Melvin. The United States refused to listen. Americans weren't willing to make sacrifices, they preferred to keep on living as though their sky wasn't falling. By the time they realized we were right, there was no way to implement the technologies as they were designed.

Means. What was the energy source? Solar power?

Melvin. It's actually a hybrid of solar and geothermal energy -- energy generated from the ground, from the Earth itself. They are solar panels, but the important thing is that they have to be pressed against the ground. No rooftops, no concrete, nothing like that. In this phenomenon, the Sun and Earth kind of work in synergy to produce far more power than either could on their own.

So we race against the clock with American leaders, trying to figure out how to replace all that energy they were about to lose. At first we figure, let's hurry up and build a bunch of stations out in the countryside. Great, except due to the nature of how this energy is collected, it rapidly deteriorates over time and distance. If it isn't used within a few miles of where it's harvested, the energy leaks. It disappears. We have to find a way to put these stations inside of cities.

Our next thought is, if they have to sit against the ground, then let's bulldoze city parks and put the stations in there. Great. Except there just isn't enough land to do that.

We can suck way more power out of a plot of ground if we build a sort of bowl around it that bounces more sunlight into it. Sort of like a satellite dish works, you know? Or a siphon. One or two of those would give us enough to run an entire city.

But we don't time to build all those. American cities only have a couple weeks of power left at this point. Our only remaining option is to acquire buildings that resemble that bowl-like shape, and ...

Hall. Oh no.

I refuse to believe where this is going.

Crouch. The government seized almost every sizable football stadium in the country, and retrofitted them into permanent, single-purpose buildings for one purpose. Collecting power. Football was left without a place to play.

Tebow. Just ... just take a season off football! Just wait until you build new stadiums somewhere else!

Crouch. The crisis had already left the economy staggering. Nobody had the money for all that, Timmy. College and pros combined, that's over a hundred huge stadiums you're asking for them to build, just like that.

Hall. More than that, then. Take five years off. Ten.

Crouch. I think you're overestimating the patience of the American people. They have moved on. Build all the stadiums you want. America has moved on.

Means. There's no way. This is ... That's America. America doesn't just lose football like that.

Melvin. You're denying this, and I understand it.

But here. Look for yourself. Name a stadium. Let's see it as it stands today.

We could easily decide not to call his bluff. It would be less painful.

Mitchell. OK. Show me Lincoln Financial. Philly fans would never let that happen.

Hall. Kansas City, then. Nobody would ever do that to Arrowhead.

Don't do it, Tim. Don't look. It won't help you.

Tebow. Florida.

A piece of me is gone. I feel as though someone has ripped my arm off. Ne and Maryse can only offer silent pity. The loveliest thing about my country has been gutted and destroyed. I look over to Nate, always the man of ambition, always the one with an answer.

He says nothing. He has begun to cry.

* * *

That night, I sleep without dreaming, because there isn't a thing to dream about. My team sits around a breakfast table, holding sippy cups full of coffee.

Mitchell. Ricky told me everybody switched to sippy cups in the 13th century. They didn't like how often they spilled with normal cups. Even wine glasses have little sippy nozzles on the top.

Hall. I guess they've transcended dignity.

Mitchell. That's the only way you can beat it, I guess. Forget it's there.

St-Hilaire. I talked to Ricky, too. Same story with the CFL. Every team's shut down. We've held possession so long that everybody lost interest. Except for Halifax, but I guess they're in the NFL now.

Tebow. The Halifax Titans, huh.

I handed the ball off to Nate for a while. He looked like he needed it, but I don't know if it was such a good idea. He's hunched over away from the table, holding it, staring at it.

Means. Let's just down it. Take a knee three times, and end it.

Tebow. After all this? That's how it ends?

Means. If we keep driving, we cross another sea, land in Norway, go through Russia, end up in India somewhere ... the world's round, Timmy.

I'm old. We're all getting old. What are we?

Hall. Damn it, we're football players.

Means. We're what? What players? What is football?

No ... from here on, we're a band of wandering assholes. At least the minstrels of old knew how to play a flute.

Ricky bursts in, shouting.

Williams. I've got a plan!

Tebow. Huh?

Williams. We have a 26-minute window. Precisely. Get your asses to the line.

* * *

I am going to throw the ball into space.

The astronomers of The City have long coveted a number of "straight shots" they've identified. There are very few of them, but they're there: a straight trajectory that points endlessly into outer space and beyond. Following this line, a projectile would escape the gravitational pull of any and all planets and black holes, fly clear of any meteor showers, and reach the edge of the universe, after which it would be free to sail outward until the end of time.

They require the Earth to sit a in a very precise position and rotation, and as such, straight shots only come around once every few decades. One of them is opening up now. Right now.

The Lord has a plan.

I will launch it into space along this trajectory. The pass will sail on, uncaught and un-tipped by the astral secondary. The play will remain alive forever. So will the greatest game of sport the world has ever seen, and so, in some small way, will the sport I love.

The Lord has a plan, Timmy.

Leland has arranged for the City to provide us a deep-space probe. It features a compartment capable of carrying a small payload, and that is where the ball will sit.

This operation is complicated by the rules of our game. CFL rules state that if a game is played within in the sovereign territory of another nation, the players must adhere to the rules of that nation's governing football body. That is the Greenland Football League, which, thanks to Ricky Williams' unstoppable play, has banned laterals or intentional fumbles of all kinds.

So I can't simply drive upfield until the launch pad is behind the line of scrimmage, turn around, and fumble it into the spacecraft. We briefly considered uploading an advanced artificial intelligence to its computers and signing it to the Argonauts, so that it could legally qualify as a player eligible to receive a handoff, but dooming a soul to fly through nothingness, alone and for eternity, violates every ethical code on or off the books.

My only option is a forward pass, while the probe is off the ground. Leland can leave it to hover for a few moments, giving me a little time in the pocket, but the fiery exhaust from the rockets require me to keep a safe distance. I'm going to need to throw the ball about 80 yards into the compartment. Then, Leland will remotely slam the door shut and send the craft on its way.

We have decided that Nereida, the senior Canadian on the team, should touch the ball on the final play. She will act as the center and snap the ball to me. The two of us watch the engines fire up as we stand on the 4,068,054-yard line.

Volquez. Timmy. I just realized, I gotta snap it jav-in.

Tebow. Ohhh ... Oh, it won't fit in the compartment with the jav out, will it?

Volquez. No ...

Fuck! I wish we had more time. We could have figured this out. Fuck.

Tebow. It's okay. I can do it. I can throw it without the jav.

Volquez. Are you sure? Maybe we should call this off. Wait 'til the next straight shot.

Tebow. Leland told me the next one isn't for another 40 years. I'm not gonna live forever. We have to do this now.

She looks upfield, shading her eyes from the exhaust. And then she turns and grabs me by my face mask.

Volquez. Then gun that shit, Timmy.

Nereida tilts her helmet upward just a bit, careful not to incur a conduct penalty, and gives the ball a kiss.

Volquez. Be good, baby. Fly straight.

I drop back in the pocket for the last time. The ball feels funny in my hands with the javelin in. Like it doesn't want to go.

Tebow. May the Lord watch over you.

The ball is out of my hand ... up ...

It's wobbling. Its nose trembles up and down.

The pass is short and to the right. It is sucked into the exhaust of the rocket and completely incinerated.

2033
LAKELAND, FLORIDA

I tried to drum up some business by setting up a little sign outside the front door. It didn't seem to make a difference. So then I blew up a couple of balloons and tied them to the corners. There just isn't much foot traffic in a suburban strip mall.

My phone keeps buzzing. I guess the City never invented a phone that gets the hint when you go a long time without answering anybody. Or maybe they could have, but they want to make sure you don't hide inside yourself for too long. I don't know. I guess I'll check the voicemails, at least.

Voicemail message. Thank you for calling the Tim Tebow Football Studio. This Fall, save 20 percent when you sign up the whole family. Leave a message and we will be happy to return your call.

Melvin. Hi Tim, it's Leland. We double-checked your samples, and can confirm your Northern constitution is gone. It's now safe for you to play football against American players. Well, safe for them, anyway.

So yeah, buddy, you're cleared to play. If you want. Any questions, give me a call.

Sigh.

Voicemail message. Thank you for calling the Tim Tebow Football Studio. This Fall, save 20 percent when you sign up the whole family. Leave a message and we will be happy to return your call.

Unknown number. Hello, Mr. Tebow. I'm an intern at Orlando Weekly, a free weekly magazine that's in, um, Orlando obviously. I was wondering if I could talk to you about your career in the Canadian Football League. Because once you went up to Canada, you totally disappeared out of the spotlight.

I was reading about the CFL and it looks like it was way different. Is it true that there were only three downs? And the part about the rouge, where you can kick it into the end zone and get a point? Are there any other interesting things about the CFL we could talk about?

Anyways, hope you're interested. Give our office a call back if you'd like to talk. Thanks.

I give these interviews sometimes. Years ago, when I first got back home, I really wanted to tell my story, and I was reaching out to sportswriters left and right. ESPN, Sports Illustrated, Bleacher Nation. All the big outlets. I'd occasionally get a call back just because they wanted to be polite, but it became clear in a hurry that nobody cares about football anymore, past or present. I may as well be a horseshoes champion.

It's usually someone like this, some kid whose editor is letting him write 300 words on the Sudoku page of some alt-weekly. I'd tell them anything they asked me, but they don't really care about the Canadian game. They always ask me about maple syrup and Raghib Ismail.

Might want to leave your name next time, kid.

Voicemail message. Thank you for calling the Tim Tebow Football Studio. This Fall, save 20 percent when you sign up the whole family. Leave a message and we will be happy to return your call.

Maryse St-Hilaire. Hey Timmy. Hope you're doing okay. You ever thought about playing Aussie rules football? It's gonna be the biggest sport in the world soon, just like they said in the City. The league's expanding to the States. I'm going down to Charleston next week for tryouts. You ought to think about coming along. It's the best sport on Earth.

Objectively speaking, it absolutely is. Having to dribble on grass, though. That's unsettling.

Voicemail message. Thank you for calling the Tim Tebow Football Studio. This Fall, save 20 percent when you sign up the whole family. Leave a message and we will be happy to return your call.

Dante Hall. Hey man! November's coming up again. Wanted to see if you wanted to go on the stadium tour with us this year. Nate, Ne, Todd and I are all going. This time we're thinking about hitting Chicago first to see Soldier Field, then go east to Ohio Stadium, then Baltimore to see M&T Bank, then the Meadowlands.

If you don't wanna go, I get it. Seriously do. But I wanted to invite you, at least.

Could you let me know if you ever hear from Freddie, too? Thanks, man. Later.

Every year for the last few years, some of my teammates and I have made little road trips from town to town, just to visit some of the power plants that used to be football stadiums. The people who work there are always confused to see us and ask us why we're there. I think they let us go wander around out of apathy. A lot of the stadiums still have some of the old seats, the scoreboards, the old locker rooms. It's neat.

But my heart can't really take it anymore. Last year we went to Mile High, and I looked down at what used to be the field, and all of a sudden I just started bawling in front of everybody. It was embarrassing. I can't do that again.

I still haven't heard from Freddie since I left the City. He decided to stay up there. I know he had some tax stuff waiting for him when he got home, but I think he's staying up there because it's the place that makes him happiest. Whatever he's doing up there, I hope he's doing okay.

Voicemail message. Thank you for calling the Tim Tebow Football Studio. This Fall, save 20 percent when you sign up the whole family. Leave a message and we will be happy to return your call.

Literary agent. Tim Tebow, hi, this is Josh. I did receive your drafts, thank you for sending them.

Unfortunately, we just cannot sell an entire novel about football. The interest isn't there. The book business is flat to begin with, and ... I can tell you worked hard on all these paintings, but I don't know how in the world we would use these in a book. It's hard for me to understand what you want us to do with this.

So yeah, maybe take some time, think about this in terms of what would work in a book, and get back with me.

I don't know why I even emailed him. The process of publishing a book makes Quebec seem like Rhode Island. I don't know why anyone ever writes them.

Voicemail message. Thank you for calling the Tim Tebow Football Studio. This Fall, save 20 percent when you sign up the whole family. Leave a message and we will be happy to return your call.

Jim Mitchell. Hey Tim, this is Jim from Lakeland Properties ... I think we can restructure your lease on your studio. I know you don't have a lot of capital right now, but if you can see what your bank can do in terms of some kind of loan extension ... I'd love to work something out. Please get back with me soon.

That's a call I need to return. Jim's been great. He's one of those few folks my age who still love football, and he used to watch me play at Florida, so I got kind of a sweetheart deal on this lease.

If business stays like this much longer, I'm gonna feel like I'm taking advantage of him. Barely anybody's signed up for classes at the Tim Tebow Football Studio in months. I really need to close up shop. Lord, I don't want to do that.

Seven years back home, and I still can't let go.

Voicemail message. Thank you for calling the Tim Tebow Football Studio. This Fall, save 20 percent when you sign up the whole family. Leave a message and we will be happy to return your call.

Nereida Volquez. Tim. Dante said he still hasn't heard back from you.

It's not healthy, Timmy ... you gotta let go of football. Come along with us, remember it and what you loved about it, but let it go. Think about it like this. Football was the most beautiful thing in the world, and you got to be there for the end of it. The end of what it was, anyway. Doesn't that make you feel lucky? To have seen it?

I just think about you sitting in the middle of that strip mall in the middle of Florida. Just baking in this big oven of ... I don't know, sadness?

We're here, is what I'm tellin' you. All of us. Take care of yourself, Timmy.

I know.

Voicemail message. Thank you for calling the Tim Tebow Football Studio. This Fall, save 20 percent when you sign up the whole family. Leave a message and we will be happy to return your call.

Natrone Means. Tim. I'm gonna make this as short as I can, okay? So maybe you'll actually listen this time.

The NFL season opener's in two weeks. Goodland Broncos against the Cheyenne Raiders. I got Elway to bump up the offer to one year, $33,000. What you can do is fly into Denver, then take I-70 east until you hit Goodland.

We play on the old high school football field. We'll throw in 10 percent of gate sales. Tickets are only four bucks and we only draw a couple hundred people per game, but hey. It's meal money.

Leland told me you're medically cleared to play. I tell you what, Timmy. I am 61 years old. I wake up every day wishing to God I could still play. But I can't. You're 46. I would tear off my arm to be that young and play again. Even for just a game.

Don't sit around and get old and think back on what a fuckin' shame it was that you didn't pick up this phone.

End of messages.

We're the ham radio hobbyists of our day. There aren't many of us. Those younger than us don't understand why football is special. Was special. I had this Civil War book as a kid I read all the time, and the part I always remember is the very, very end. Right after the war, the Union had these big parades full of veterans, year after year. the decades passed, and in the 1890s, the ranks of the parade grew thinner and thinner, until no one was left to march at all. I wonder what it will be like to be that very last man.

I always thought of my football adventure as letting a beast out of the zoo. I don't know if that's right, because they do not keep a stallion at the zoo: a specialized animal of great might that does not destroy with teeth or claws, but conquers land by its hooves, one enormous plot at a time, until all of the world is seen and claimed. It was born in the stables. It died in the snow. We rode it out the door and into the grand expanse of the world where it had always belonged.

Music: "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore" by The Walker Brothers
Producer: Chris Mottram | Special Thanks: Graham MacAree | Copy Editor: Kurt Mensching

You have never read a writer more recently than Jon Bois. He is a featured contributor at SB Nation, where he writes, among other things, the Breaking Madden series. He lives in Louisville, Kentucky, and he will happily waste more of your time on Twitter at @jon_bois.

An interview with the author

About the Author

Jon has been with SB Nation since 2009. He is the author of the science fiction football story 17776, and producer of the documentary series Chart Party and Pretty Good.