Gridiron parallels and pain

Column

Regarding the lingering hangover afflicting the 2011 Pasco High Pirates football team, the prognosis is worse than anyone could have imagined.

Anyone, that is, but a select handful.

These would include the few, the proud, the (even now!) tormented teammates from the 1983 Pirates who, like this year's model, endured a bitter loss in the state semifinals.

Then and now, as well, "Maybe it would have been better to have been blown out by five touchdowns," says Brad Starling, who quarterbacked the 1983 team and was offensive coordinator for this year's. "Then we'd know we just didn't belong."

Ah, revisionist history. By this suggestion, Starling demonstrates how multiple phases of grief — in this case, denial and bargaining — can occupy the same moment.

But that's not how either season-ending disappointment went down. In each — and there's no getting around it — the outcome was closer than a coin toss, and as arbitrary. Worse, if an unscientific sampling of the '83 Pirates is a fair barometer, the sting of imminent triumph rejected can, and might, last a lifetime.

"You get that close," says Wilton Simpson, 45, the high school free safety turned egg farmer and Republican state Senate candidate, "it sticks with you."

They are sitting around a couple of shoved-together tables at the Dade City Beef O'Brady's on a recent afternoon — Starling and Simpson and Greg Keith, the team's center, now owner of a power-tools retailer — and Keith is nodding. "I've learned to live with it," he says, "but I haven't accepted it."

Small wonder. The dozen or so '83 Pirates who traveled to Crawfordville on Friday night scarcely expected to stumble into some eerie time warp. But there it was. An uncharacteristically sloppy start; an early two-touchdown hole; a furious second-half rally; a cliffhanging — and ultimately unsatisfying — climax.

Pacing the sidelines as the fourth quarter ground down, Keith bumped into Mark Jeter, an '83 halfback from Tallahassee. "He grabbed my hand," Keith says, "and said, 'Anything about this at all familiar to you?'" Only everything. "And then he was gone. I never saw him again after that."

Chasing ghosts, this year's Pirates succumbed in triple overtime after believing, fleetingly, they'd won. In OT No. 1, Wakulla fumbled its try for a two-point conversion as flags flew. The head official signaled game over, Pirates win. Then the zebras huddled — never a good sign — and the call was overruled. The play had been blown dead, and Wakulla had new life.

Familiar? Don't get the guys in their 40s started. The team bus blew a tire near Hawthorne, 30 miles outside Palatka, costing the visitors 90 minutes and their warm-up routine. They fumbled the kickoff and trailed throughout, but with less than two minutes remaining had closed to within 5 points, 18-13, and had the game in their hands: first down at the Palatka 2-yard line.

"We were so close," Starling says. "I could see the goal line. It was right there . Greg here, he's bent over to snap the ball; he could smell it." So they line up to punch it in, but an eager underclassman end flinched. False start, 5-yard penalty; Pasco wound up turning it over on downs.

"I fell on the ground, bawling my eyes out," Keith says. "And when I finally looked up, there were a bunch of other guys on the ground doing exactly the same thing."

Beyond that, "It's a life lesson," Starling says. "Maybe it'll help teach them how to deal with traumatic experiences." For instance? "That night, I thought my world had ended," he says. A month later, his dad was diagnosed with advanced cancer. He died not long after. Survive heartache on the playing field, Starling guesses now, "it helps prepare you a little for the stuff that happens in the real world."

A little, indeed. A while ago, Starling acquired the game films from 1983, and a Palatka radio station's recording of the semifinal. More than once, he's synchronized their playing, switching them off just before the end.

Let today's Pirates find their own way through the stages of gridiron grief. In the world according to Brad Starling, it's always first-and-goal at the Palatka 2, and Greg Keith is settling over the ball, sniffing victory.