Free QB 1 by Mike Lupica Page B

had time to give one look over there, saw a white uniform that could only be number 1. He didn’t even have time to plant his foot, didn’t need to, before throwing on the dead run. He flung the ball across his body in Calvin’s direction, right before getting buried by the Shelby defense.
    Jake’s helmet would end up sideways on his head; that was the picture that would be in the paper the next day, a big chunk of grass sticking out of his face mask.
    His right shoulder pad was outside his jersey when he finally got up. By then the noise inside Cullen Field told him it was a touchdown. A lot had changed in this place since last fall, starting with the final score. But at least this was an ending people could understand and take away with them so they didn’t think the day was a total loss.
    Cullen to Morton for a touchdown.

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    CALVIN HAD THE GOOD SENSE NOT TO CELEBRATE AND TURN the end zone into a dance floor, not at the end of a beatdown like this.
    What he did instead was ran over to where Jake was still kneeling, extend a hand and help him up. “Maybe you got more rope to you than I thought.” Then walked away before Jake could say anything.
    The players on both teams were milling around on the field now, even the big guys like Nate who’d been banging one another around all day hugging it out, some laughing, like they’d turned back into high school boys now that the game was over, no matter how much they looked like men. It was all a part of it, what happened on these fields, something you all had shared.
    The Shelby quarterback, Cody Bretton, came over to Jake and said, “We’re lucky they didn’t put you in sooner.”
    â€œYou guys were better,” Jake said.
    â€œYou really Wyatt Cullen’s brother?” Cody asked, making it sound like he wanted to know if Jake was related to the Lord himself. “Like Eli following Peyton?”
    â€œI
wish
,” Jake said.
    Finally it was time to leave the field, get back to the locker room, listen to what Coach McCoy had to say about the game, find out if there was any news about Tim’s knee, then hustle back home with Bear and Nate to watch the Texas game that had already begun in Austin, watch the star freshman quarterback in the family do it up big in front of the whole country.
    Jake looked around for Bear and Nate, saw them up ahead of him, nearly to the tunnel, at the front of a long parade of Granger Cowboys, a lot of them with their heads down, everything so much quieter now than it had been when they ran out of that tunnel a couple of hours before.
    Some of them had their helmets in their hands, what Coach McCoy called their hats. Same hats that had just been handed to them, big-time, by the Shelby Mustangs.
    It was then that Jake saw Casey Lindell, helmet in his own right hand, walking underneath the goalposts with Sarah.
    The two of them walking close, Casey casually reaching around with his left hand and putting it around her shoulder.

    Wyatt struggled for Texas in the first half, looked more nervous than Jake had ever seen him, throwing two early picks. One play he just flat missed a perfect snap when he was standing back in the shotgun. By halftime he had completed only five of his first seventeen passes, none for scores, Texas down 17–7 to Washington, the announcers talking about the high school hero from Granger acting his age.
    It was 24–14 for Washington going into the fourth quarter. And that was when Wyatt Cullen turned into, well, Wyatt Cullen, starting the Longhorns comeback by going six-for-six on the eighty-yard drive that got his team back to 24–21.
    The drive that won it started at the Texas forty with four minutes and change left and ended with ninety seconds left, Wyatt throwing a dead-solid perfect strike to his tight end over the middle, putting the ’Horns up 28–24. That’s the way it ended after what looked like the whole defensive backfield knocked