Flame City
Part Four
It had been a long time since Mount Maris was involved in a true heavyweight fight of a game. Some said that their last classic game was the Redvali Championship loss to their archenemies, the University of Avgaria, when they had failed to score on the final play to take the lead. Many said it was when they defeated the Janford Owls to keep them from repeating as champions of the Super Twelve. But after the game in Ramusok, everyone knew that the Friars had just played their first true classic against an international team. That game would be in the memory of the Friars fans and everyone else in Redvale for a long time. Just when they were beginning to lose their image as the villains of the country, they gained it again when that game was over.
Mount Maris were born to be the villains, and they embraced their role again when they played under the lights at Capital Coliseum, and fell just short. They weren’t down for the entire game. In the first quarter, their offense stalled but their defense held strong, and the teams went into the locker rooms tied 3-3 at the end of it. During the second quarter, the Friars actually took the lead when Erland Sagen knocked a thirty eight yard field goal through the uprights after Arend Starke decided against going for it on fourth and inches.
They’d go into the half with that 6-3 lead, and the game was shaping up to be one of the best defensive duels of the year, but in the third quarter, the scoring opened up more. Taron Thalman would catch the Maris defense playing too close to the line when a play action pass let Seth Greenman get free by the sideline, and Jay Melo would for once not be able to catch his mark. Greenman scored a forty yard touchdown, to give RCU the 13-6 lead, which they would keep until the fourth quarter.
In crunch time, the Friars stepped up their play and played like a team that really, really didn’t want to lose. Eke Kuhn and Wolfango Vaas would sack Thalman twice in the fourth quarter to force a punt, but the punt was stopped at nearly the one yard line to force the Friars to run the ball out of their own end zone. Inko Sheffield would be the one to take the ball, but on second down, he was forced backwards by Kol Chessmore and would fall into the end zone for a safety. RCU was up 15-6, with seven minutes left. Things looked bad, but the Friars still had fight left in them. They knew they were representing their country, and they knew that everyone back home would judge them based on what happened in this massive game that was being viewed by millions.
On first down of the resulting possession, Julien Preus would get his fourth interception of the year as Thalman attempted to throw a curl pass to Piet Talaat that would go slightly off target and instead would land in the hands of the quick cornerback. Preus ran down the field for ten yards before being brought down, setting up Mount Maris on the thirty yard line of the Dragons. Suddenly, the momentum in the stadium had shifted for both the locals and for the thousand or so Marisians who had made the trip to Cosumar. Previously, the home fans had been loud and on their feet… Now, the atmosphere was much more tense as the Friars offense was back and with good field position.
Drago Morena connected with Aleix Fuller and Cooper Biro four times to bring the Friars to the ten yard line, and then, Mount Maris stepped out of their usual passing scheme with a draw run down the middle with Lewis Ite, who reached the goal line before being brought down by the safety. The Friars had first and goal, and their offense was rolling for the first time in the game. Fuller would distract the defense and draw a double team in the end zone, and Morena would use that as an opportunity to role out and dive over Martell Chievous when the senior linebacker went for a low tackle. Morena would get the touchdown, and would piss off the home crowd for the first time when he and Lewis Ite celebrated by running in front of the students behind the goalposts.
The next RCU drive would see them chew some clock, but they failed on third down when Eke Kuhn hit Thalman behind the line before he could hand off the ball. The Dragons would have to either attempt a fifty eight yard field goal or punt, and they chose to punt to pin the Friars deep in their own territory for the next possession. But nobody counted on Drago Morena heating up when it mattered the most and throwing quick pass after quick pass to Fuller, Biro, and Lopes as the clock winded down. They would roll down the field and get to the twenty yard line, but they were running out of time and had no timeouts. With six seconds left, the final play would be something of a hail mary. It was third down, but down didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was either getting a touchdown or quickly stopping the clock with an incompletion.
“We’ve got the advantage here,” said Arend Starke, giving the instructions to Drago before the final play. “We’ve had them reeling all drive. We’re acting and they’re reacting. Keep that in mind. They’re going to be expecting us to try something different, but we aren’t. We’re going with the connection between you and Aleix that’s worked for us all season. Here’s the play. I want you to look for Aleix as soon as he gets separation, and if they jam him at the line, you’re going to look on the other side for the option route from Cooper. Got it?”
“Yeah,” Drago replied, looking over the play sheet and moving to the huddle to communicate the play to his teammates. “Pay attention, guys, we don’t run this one a lot… It’s seven hundred gun left, x vert, y hitch, z shake, f stop, on two. And Aleix, look for the signal before the snap. Break!”
They broke the huddle, and marched out onto the field. Everyone in the stadium was standing, and the home crowd was making noise too, but Drago managed to focus and got into his position in the shotgun. The Dragons were press covering the receivers, and when Aleix looked for the sign from Drago, he flashed his index and middle fingers. That was their sign for Aleix to go deep and expect a pass to his side of the field. Drago then took a step forward and pointed at Tad Partain, showing Carlo that Partain was the blitzing member of the secondary. The offensive line shifted subtly, moving slightly to the left to block Partain better. Now, it was time to start the play.
“Down!” shouted Drago, stepping back into position as the line lowered themselves. “Ready… Six hundred! Six hundred, go!” he continued, and then Carlo delivered a high snap that he managed to pull down as he started dropping. The line had a good push, as Rui Castille put Fillip Stellar on his back to buy a lot of time for Drago. Aleix was matched up with the Dragons’ top corner, Alex Na’Tomas, and managed to get separation immediately as he used a body feint to make it seem he was cutting inside before taking off down the field. He looked back to see if the ball was coming, and Drago wound up and threw an arcing pass towards the goal line that Aleix should have been able to catch in his stride.
Because of the way Drago floated the ball to hang in the air, instead of aiming for velocity, it was a footrace to reach it. Aleix was faster, but he slowed down a bit to make sure he didn’t outrun the pass and end up getting hit in the helmet by it. The clock was at one second by now, and Aleix started to turn to catch the ball and fall into the end zone. Or he did, until Na’Tomas caught up with him and tried to reach the ball first by giving him a slight shove. It wasn’t that he was trying to play dirty, but the two players were both trying to reach the same space, and so some physicality was inevitable. Fuller went to the ground and rolled forward without catching the ball, which landed in between him and Na’Tomas, incomplete as the clock hit zero.
The stadium roared, and Aleix threw his arms in the air and looked to the head referee and then to the linesman, wondering where the pass interference call was. “Where’s the fucking flag?” Aleix snapped, in a rare moment of anger. The referees were converging to decide what should be called, and then they broke their little huddle without drawing a flag. “Where’s the fucking flag?” Aleix repeated, louder. By now, the Mount Maris staff were running down the sideline to argue with the referees.
“How is that not a PI?” asked Arend Starke, throwing his play sheets to the ground angrily. Drago got in on it too, as did some of the other players including Rui Castille and Gerard Lopes. “You called a push off on Aleix earlier and now it’s not a foul when they do it to us? Are you gonna review this or what?”
After a brief conversation, the referees separated again and the lead referee turned his microphone on and turned towards the crowd. “The previous play is under review,” he announced, causing boos to rain down from the stands. Meanwhile, Aleix was getting into it with Na’Tomas about the shove.
“Oh, fuck off, you lowdown son of a bitch,” Aleix said, after Na’Tomas insisted that he hadn’t shoved him. Na’Tomas then bumped him as he was walking away, and that was where the harsh words turned into fighting. Aleix tackled Na’Tomas, teammates ran in to separate them, and somehow it turned into a brawl between the Friars offense and the Dragons defense. They were all gathered by the goal line, exchanging shoves and even punches as the coaches tried to pull the two sides apart. The referees blew their whistles, but it didn’t help at all.
And then the benches cleared. “C’mon, boys! Are you gonna let them treat us like that! Let’s get em!” shouted Jay Melo, ripping off his helmet and charging into the fray, with most of the members of the Friars defense in pursuit. With the Maris bench cleared, the Dragons had no choice but to clear their own bench to double the size of the brawl. Some of the Friars fans in the stands would be having flashbacks to when Mount Maris and Maris Tech cleared the benches when Tech defeated the Friars by a single field goal to advance to the Redvali Championship. Most of the other fans, and the reporters in the stadium, had never seen something like this in person.
It was surreal, even. The coaches finally managed to separate the players after two full minutes, and the Friars were still outraged and were shouting back and forth with the Dragons. The only silence on the field came when the referees broke their huddle and announced the outcome of the review. “After review, the ruling on the field stands,” said the head referee. The crowd erupted into cheers, but the referee continued. “The game is over.”
There was a second roar of the crowd, this one from the Friars fans and their band. “Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit!” they shouted, as the players began leaving the field. Drago Morena was probably the worst off out of everyone, because he was the quarterback who had been robbed of a national championship back in Redvale because of a very similar missed call. Now, he was seeing his team lose like this in their biggest nonconference game ever. He’d went from disbelief to sadness to burning anger all in the space of a minute or two, and he didn’t even care that the cameras were focusing in on him.
“I know how you’re feeling and I know what you’re thinking,” Arend told him, as they started the walk across the field to the visitor’s tunnel. “You win some, you lose some. It’s bull but that’s the way it goes sometimes. We’ll get over it. We lost this way against Avgaria and look what happened after that. We went on to win the Mineral Conference-”
Drago wasn’t in the mood to hear comforting words. He pushed Arend away, and looked directly into the cameras that were following him. “Esta es una maldita parodia!” he shouted. “This is a fucking travesty! They’ve disgraced our game with this win!”
Aleix followed him, except, as one of the few mages on the team, he blew a puff of fire out of his mouth to make the reporters leave him alone. “I swear I’m going to unload on these motherfuckers if I get on the national team and we play them,” the cameras caught him telling Drago. “I finally have a use for that pistol I never travel without…”
“If anything, you need to unload on these fucking refs and do the game of football a favor,” Drago snapped, finally taking his helmet off as they got to the entrance of the tunnel. He stopped there and decided to do at least one nice thing, hurling the helmet into the stands for someone to take home. He didn’t want it any more… Not when wearing it would remind him of this game.
“Hey! Drago! You coming back next year to beat these guys in Maris?” he heard a fan asking him, and he paused before turning to face the fan.
“Hell yeah,” he replied, knowing that the cameras had caught the exchange. The press would take that as confirmation, and even though he was unsure about giving it, he already knew that he wanted to come back. This game gave him even more motivation to return. He wanted to face the Dragons at the Arena of Light and set everything right. It was the same feeling that he had felt after losing to Avgaria and losing to Janford the season before then. When he was finally walking through the tunnel with the others, he let out his frustration in full. “God, why can’t I get anything to fucking go right in the end of these games? I threw that pick against Janford that cost us the Super Twelve, then we ran the table in the conference the next season but lost the national title because of the fucking referees, and now we had a chance to beat one of the best teams in the world and we lose in the same way. I swear the gods have put a curse on me.”
One thing that connected Friars quarterbacks was that none of them handled losing well. Somehow, the big city and the bright lights of Maris attracted the fiercest of competitors, the types who couldn’t just shake hands with their opponent and get over a loss. “Fuck this fucking game,” Drago muttered under his breath, keeping his head down as he and Aleix headed to the locker room. “I’m staying for a fifth year but I have the feeling it’s going to end the same way.”
“Eh, we still have some games left and we have the playoffs,” Aleix sighed. “Maybe things won’t turn out as bad as you’re thinking they will. We can get a good seed with one loss to the team that’s probably the best of the conference champions… Hell, it might even look good on our resume to play so close with them if they run the table for the rest of the season. But seriously man, fuck these refs. They should never call a game again.”
“That’s something we can all agree on,” Drago said, sitting down on the bench and pulling his jersey over his head and off. He sighed, running a hand through his black hair and starting to unlace his pads. “We need to shift focus, though. We might be in the playoffs but we’re still playing for seeds. If you want a second shot at RCU, this is your chance to get it. They’ll go in as the top seed, and there’s a chance we could have a rematch. A do over. It’s not many times that a team gets a chance at a do over only weeks after a loss. Let’s focus on kicking the shit out of the next two teams that we have to face, and hope that we can either end up on the same side of the bracket as them or that we can both make runs to the finals. And then? Payback time.”
“Since when have you been Mr. Positivity?” chuckled Aleix. “You’re right, though. It sucks what happened, and I mean it when I said those refs need to be fired, but we’ve got to shift gears again and look at dominating Army and Vietussia. We win both of those games by good margins, and we get a good playoff seed, and with a good seed, we have a decent chance of playing RCU again and knocking ‘em off. I like the way you think.”
“Coach Starke is rubbing off on me,” Drago admitted, as the team finished filing into the room. “And hey, like I said, I agree with you on the referees. I’m getting real sick of losing because of them. I already objectively lost one ring because of them, and who knows if they made us lose another one with that no call? I’m ready for them to give a questionable call in our favor for once.”
“That’s never happening. We’re the villains of our country. The ones who show up wearing black and put down the underdogs that everyone loves. The ones who win more than anyone else and always have a target on their backs,” said Aleix. “There’s no chance of a fifty fifty call going our way because it’s not in the script for us to win. Everyone, the opposing team and their fans and the referees, they see us as a villain to be defeated. Not as the heroes that our own city sees us as. The best thing we can do? Embrace the villain role and work on getting back to the level where even the refs can’t screw us.”
They would embrace the villain role indeed in the coming weeks. The question was, would they be good enough to survive the rest of their nonconference schedule and get a good seed? And would they be able to take down RCU if they managed to meet again in the playoffs? Those were questions that nobody had answers to.
