Which isn’t saying much, seeing as how “the streak” is “playing a soccer game on Sunday for four straight weeks.” When I’ll be playing again, I dunno—I’ll be in Chicago next Sunday and going in for surgery the next day. How long that’ll keep me off the field… each injury has varied, so I’m not going to speculate. Suffice it to say that I’m glad that my last game for a while was this one.
It certainly helps that the final score was 4-0, but I felt like I was back to my old self. Sorta. I was panting and wheezing and my chest hurt when I would come off the field, but aside from the lack of endurance, it was good. I was back to playing sweeper—center defender—where I played for years before my knee made it hard to make sharp twists and turns. Today, no such concerns.
I felt comfortable, I felt confident, I enjoyed yelling at my teammates… it was usually about players from the other team who were standing wide open, so one time they were standing around on their own and I started yelling… it was our free kick, so it didn’t matter where they were standing. Oops. (In my defense, when the referee blew the whistle for a hand ball, he pointed toward our end of the field.)
I made some little mistakes here and there, but overall, I’m happy. And now soccer is going to be in the taillights for a little while, but if this was my send-off game or my birthday game or whatever you want to call it… if this was the last one for a few days/weeks/months, I’m okay with that. Which doesn’t change the fact that I’ll keep going to games (even if I’m on crutches) so I can yell at my teammates from the sidelines.
