Since early September I’ve been really wanting to throw a football around with someone. It makes sense given the season, but until a few weeks ago I bet it had been 25 years since I’d even thought about it. After the last throw or catch on some early-’90s day I’ll never remember, after throwing and catching footballs every autumn day and a lot of others from elementary school until college, I just didn’t do it anymore. I don’t even know the last time I picked up a football before recently. And now, for no reason I can discern, I’m lost in thoughts of throwing a soft, arcing spiral to someone, watching the ball into my hands after they throw it back to me, and repeating that process over and over and over.

I played organized football from elementary school until college. Fourth grade until sophomore year. Age nine to age 20. Eleven years. I’m 53 and the 11 years from here back to 42 feel like a blip. Nothing. Pretty sure I turn 64 next month. I’ll be 75 a week or two after that. But when I was 20 those 11 years were half of forever and Football Player was most of what I had known myself to be. Elementary school, junior high, high school, and the first two years of college. Each an eon that feels more heavy and definitive the older I get. The past won’t stop being present. Those 11 years have lasted so much longer than their actual length.

For most of my football time I played tight end. As a varsity starter in my junior and senior years at Rochester John Marshall High School I was OK at blocking and very good at catching passes that weren’t sure touchdowns. As a University of Minnesota Duluth freshman and sophomore I never played. That first year was miserable with shin splints and so much else — in football and other areas — but thrilling too. Both years I caught the ball well in practice. I was also weaker, slower, and smaller than the other tight ends. Most importantly I just didn’t get it. With the right head I could have been something. I tried as hard as I knew how to try. I also saw I was missing things most of the other guys had. Being sharp enough to see that and know I would never figure out what to do about it has been a torment.

I stopped being and thinking of myself as a football player in July 1991, during an anguished two weeks that started with a jarring epiphany and ended with mostly keeping it together while saying, “I’m not coming out this fall” to one coach who seemed to care and another who didn’t. I was so afraid I would lose my best friends, almost all athletes and mostly football players, by quitting.

I knew I would miss being on a team. I wonder if knowing how much I would miss it, or for how long, would have helped me stick it out. I still miss it so much. I miss having a sense of being and purpose for a few months every year. I miss the collisions. The ones when I got my bell rung. When shoulder pads popped and helmets clacked and guys grunted and sometimes got their sinuses cleared. Ones when I jammed fingers that still have swollen knuckles. Open field hits and line-of-scrimmage scrums. Ones where we ended up in tangled piles, pressed into soft turf, that took a while to dismantle as a ref said, “OK boys, easy now. Push off the ground, not each other.”

I also wonder about the collisions.

I don’t miss the competition. I never cared as much about winning or losing as it seemed like I should. I did enjoy beating people who really wanted to win.

The football-based dreams I have a few times every year may not actually be about football: the bus is about to leave for the first college game I’m on the travel roster for and I can’t find my helmet and I’m frantic; the coach is yelling for me to get into a game — my first college playing time! — and I can’t find my helmet on the sideline and I’m frantic; I go back out after a year of not playing and everything is familiar and exciting and it’s all going to be different this time then something changes after a couple weeks and I quit again and have no idea how to survive the embarrassment and despair even after I wake up. That also feels frantic.

I miss hanging out in a locker room and having a locker room to hang out in. I miss all the gear. I miss getting ready for practice then trudging in after it was over then being back in normal clothes with damp hair after a hot shower on a beat-up body as guys give each other shit and drift into magic October evenings toward cars and suppers and homework and dates and maybe some situations that aren’t so great. I miss all the football stuff and getting to be part of it. The aesthetics. And night games. Dewey grass under those lights. The Owatonna marching band playing “25 or 6 to 4.” The John Marshall band, something like 200 strong back then, playing our fight song. A spiraling brown ball with white stripes, lit by those lights, floating through air against bright black sky. The air. The air and the light on those nights.

What I might miss most is this: huddling up with 10 other boys to hear the quarterback — Glynner, Kirks, Z, Koepps, V, Kevbo — tell us what play we’re gonna run; breaking the huddle together, jogging up to the line of scrimmage together, getting set together; staying on the line until the agreed-upon signal, then doing my job in the prescribed play; laying a good block — down on the D tackle, out on the end, a few steps downfield on a linebacker or safety; or running an accurate pass route — down 5, 10, or 15 and then in or out, slant, post, curl, buttonhook, chair, fly.

Hang on for a sec:

Once in sophomore year of high school, 1986, in a B-squad Thursday night game under our home lights against crosstown rival Mayo, Coach Barnett called the Hook and Ladder, which we’d practiced a bunch of times but never expected to run in a game. I lined up on the left end of the line. My job was to block the defensive end for a long count of one, release on his outside, run down 10 yards, stop, turn back toward the line of scrimmage and wait for Glynner’s pass (which would already be on the way), catch it, then pitch it to halfback Hilks — who would have started the play getting a fake handoff from Glynner then tore ass toward me — when he was about five yards upfield on course to run past me by about that same distance on my outside shoulder. It worked perfectly and Hilks scored. He was really fast. I can’t remember if we won or lost the game. He went to UMD too. I think he still lives in Duluth, but I haven’t been in touch with him for a few years.

Once during junior year, in a game at Faribault, I ran a chair pattern — 10 yards down on the right side of the field, cut right, toward the sideline and for a couple steps fake like the ball is coming over my right shoulder, then cut hard left, back downfield, and really look for the ball, ideally over my left shoulder. I was slow, so I don’t know how it worked perfectly but it did. I was five yards ahead of the defensive back who’d been fooled by my dishonesty. Z threw a perfect pass for a sure touchdown that I had to stretch out for juuust enough that when I pulled it in I had trouble staying upright and maintaining my stride. I folded forward at the waist with the ball between both hands. I couldn’t stop my downward motion. The ball hit my left knee and bounced away. Incomplete pass. When I got back to the sideline my head coach came up to me laughing hard, pounded me on the left shoulder, mimicked choking, and turned away still laughing. In my despondence I knew he was trying to let me know it was OK. He had come to check on me and tell me, in a kind way, to get over it. I think we won. I don’t know for sure. I definitely haven’t thought about that play at least once a week for the last 38 years.

But what I really miss the most is this: running a good route, getting free, looking back toward the line while going full out, making eye contact with the quarterback — seeing him see me — and feeling something I don’t know how to describe as his arm and torso go through his throwing motion. Watching the ball leave his hand and come spiraling and arcing toward me, being aware of the beauty and privilege of what I’m doing in the moment or two the ball is alone against the sky, the only thing I see or know, then watching my own hands catch it. I miss that so much. Catching footballs thrown by boys with will and determination and grace, too. It was best during night games, but even in boring afternoon practices as a miserable, thrilled UMD freshman, while running the upcoming opponent’s plays so the starting defense could know what to look for, it was one of my favorite things ever. It is one of my favorite things ever.

While typing this I’m realizing I’ve gone decades without letting myself really feel how much I miss all those things. I’ve remembered them fondly, especially during football season. The football years come up in thoughts and conversation. But even when there’s some wistfulness or nostalgia, there’s way more detachment. Maybe I’ve denied myself grief because most of me believes there’s shame in my quitting and as a quitter I don’t get to miss anything I chose to give up. Maybe the regret and embarrassment about quitting, and the hopelessness that led to it, are still just too close and too much. Maybe it’s because the choked-up heartbreak I felt during the first UMD game I sat in the bleachers for, instead of standing on the sideline as part of the team, hurt with a purity so potent something important went into hiding.

I miss a lot more about being a football player than I’ve typed here. More than I remember. There are also parts I never felt comfortable with. Parts I feel remorse about handling poorly.

The only thing I want back is playing catch. Nothing else I’ve ever done feels anything like standing a little ways away from someone and throwing a football back and forth nice and easy. It’s a relational and meditative practice. That’s not what I thought about during those years. I didn’t see it that way or know those concepts. It’s not what I’m seeking, or what I’d be thinking about if I wind up tossing a ball around now. I’ll be paying attention to how the ball feels to grip and cradle, to the motion of my arm and my balance and stance, to variations in how the ball spirals or flutters after being released this way or that. To the air. The light. Because of all that stuff, with the right person in the right setting, playing catch can stop time.

Since 2003, when we moved into this house, two old, leather footballs have sat on a basement shelf next to a basketball that’s next to a couple baseball mitts holding softballs. None of that stuff has really been used for more than 15 years. Sometimes when I’m trying to find or organize something down there I’ll put on my mitt, an SSK DPG-540 my parents bought me when I was in Little League. I’ll bury my face in its palm and inhale deeply (the same way and for the same reasons any decent person would do with an old book), work the fingers and web so they’re just so, give the ball a few solid thwacks into the sweet-spot crook of its pocket, remember for a half-second how good it feels to play that kind of catch, then put the mitt back. I never pick up the basketball, but I shoot baskets in my brain a lot, feeling Jimmy Chitwood form over and over to soothe myself out of distress or into sleep. Shooting baskets can be a lot like playing catch.

When this thing with wanting to throw and catch a football started I went to the basement and got the old ones. I had to dig them out from behind a flat, plastic bin full of supplies from offices we used to have away from home. Both footballs were dusty, deflated and dry. One is a UMD Báden I somehow wound up with two or three years after quitting the team. One of my best friends was the Bulldogs’ starting quarterback for a couple years. Maybe I borrowed it from him over a summer and never returned it? The other is an official NFL model I think I got for Christmas in the early ‘80s. I never took good care of it.

I ordered a pack of inflation needles on Amazon. Pretty sure I already had a needle somewhere — I think my bicycle tire pump came with one — but who knows where it is. I’ve bought then bent then broken or lost so many of those since elementary school. Neither ball would take air, so I cut off their laces and pulled out their rubber bladders. The NFL ball’s black butyl bladder would fill, but half the air would leak out before the valve closed after I removed the needle. The latex bladder in the UMD ball was brittle and cracked and held nothing. I ordered one of each type plus new laces, a lacing awl, and a bottle of Wilson leather conditioner. A few days later I had them both reassembled, inflated, and conditioned.

The leather on the NFL ball is either toast or needs some other sort of potion to get it usable. Five or six applications of the conditioner brought out a lovely patina, but the leather is still slippery-dry and tough to grip. It looks cool. I won’t being playing catch with it. The UMD ball feels perfect. I haven’t thrown it yet. Holding it and turning it over in my hands and handling it has felt natural in ways I did not expect. I thought it might feel awkward after so many years — nostalgic and familiar but clumsy and a little sad. It had been so long. I’m so much older. I had such bad tennis elbow last year. But my hands remembered. For the first or only time in forever I didn’t think or have to think about anything. I knew what to do.

I started cross-country skiing in about 1998. Since 2001 I’ve done it at least a few times every winter — sometimes a handful of times overall, sometimes multiple times most weeks. I’ve downhill skied with similar frequency for almost as long. Every year the equipment feels more familiar and my technique gets better. But even after all that time, nothing about either form of skiing feels like part of who I am. I have to think hard about what I’m trying to do instead of just doing it.

Riding bikes is a little different. I rode around a lot on Huffy BMX bikes and 12-speeds as a kid and always had a mountain bike, but only kind of knew how to use it, in my 20s. Since the early 2000s, when I started riding with intention, I’ve covered a lot of miles on gravel and pavement and dirt and snow on a bunch of different bicycles. Some years I’ve ridden most days from April until there’s deep snow, and longer if I own a fat bike. Some years I’ve struggled to get out twice a month. Some years I’ve commuted to and from work almost every day all year. I’m not fast. I ride like a beefy, aging ex-football player. But I’ve built some muscle memory and technical skill. I finish in the top half of the bottom half of most cycling events I enter. I feel way more natural on a bike than on skis.

I threw and caught footballs hundreds of days a year from age nine to age 20. If I’ve played catch or really engaged with a football many times since then I don’t remember it. And when I gripped the old UMD football a few days ago, my body and brain knew so much more about what to do than it will ever know about what to do on skis or a bicycle. I didn’t have to remember anything. Nothing had to come back. Everything was there. It will be there when I finally throw and catch the ball.

That experience actually helps me have more patience with myself as a skier and bike rider. It leaves me a little bit jealous, in a warm way, of what skiing must feel like for friends whose bodies and brains were being formed by doing that while mine were internalizing football things. It helps me resolve some frustration about my failed attempt to become a banjo player and learn a second language in my 40s.

It also helps deepen my understanding — or at least my feelings and emerging thoughts — about some aspects of culture. About what it means to come from somewhere. To be things in ways that are inherent if not definitive. About what can and can’t be abdicated. About what is present even when it’s unnoticed. About appropriation and why it can hurt a lot of people so deeply and be tough for a lot of other people to take seriously or believe.

I have a clear memory of lying on my back in the grass of Mom and Dad’s front yard at 1427 48th St. NW, in Rochester, Minnesota, on an October Saturday afternoon in 1983 or ’84, lightly tossing my Walter Payton model Wilson youth football a few feet up into the air then catching it when it fell. There were no trees in the yard or the neighborhood yet. All I saw was blue autumn sky, some puffy clouds, and the ball. I used to lay on my bed and do the same thing with a basketball or tennis ball or Nerf football. It’s a meditation. While doing it I would be 100 percent present and somewhere else altogether.

I could do that now in my front yard, under the old maple and oak trees that are always the last ones to turn on our part of the block. Or I could do what a late-’80s Rochester JM assistant coach — a government teacher who had been a high-school and college quarterback in the 1950s — would do before a lot of practices started, while guys were playing catch before lining up for calisthenics. He’d grab a ball, jog to an open spot on the field apart from everyone else, get himself set, drop back three or five light steps, toss the ball 10 or 15 yards with a slow, quiet motion, watch it hit the ground and bounce, then jog over and pick it up and throw it back toward where he’d been standing. Over and over. Half-smile on his face the whole time. Was he remembering things while throwing a ball to no one? Or was he just throwing the ball?

I want to throw a ball back and forth with another person. The other person is important. I wonder how much of this whole thing is because I miss the boys I used to throw and catch with. And the boy they threw and caught with.

That UMD quarterback whose football I may have stolen and I both graduated high school in 1989 and started at UMD together. This summer I saw him for the first time since he came to our coach’s funeral in 2011, when neither of us was grey yet. In July he was here for a day with his wife and their two elementary-school aged boys. I met them for lunch on a weekday in Canal Park. That first year at UMD, he and I became especially good friends within a crew of fellow freshman football players. When he drove out of the Griggs Hall parking lot bound for back home at the end of that year I felt bereft in a way I haven’t since. We lived with two other football guys in 8C Village Apartments our sophomore year. It was so fun. Mostly fun.

Over lunch we asked after each other’s parents and siblings. Talked about jobs and getting old. Chatted with the awkward ease of people who once knew each other very well and now just love each other. We both text with and see other guys from UMD more often than we talk to each other. I have a never-ending thread with four of those guys, including the other two from 8C. I love them too. Sometimes we text almost every day for long stretches.

After everyone was done eating, the boys and their mom left to see about some boulders outside the restaurant. Their dad and I waited for the checks. I had to go back to work. They had things to see and do. He wanted to visit UMD. Maybe check out the stadium and grab a hat or sweatshirt in the Bulldog Shop. After a moment or two of liminal silence he said, “How are you?” I wanted to tell him a lot of things I may never know how to say.

While driving home, trying to feel and not feel, trying to breathe and stay on the road under the weight and bewilderment of 35 years of evaporated time and opportunities and potential, I thought that thing about love for the first time. My wife and I live a few blocks from UMD. I ride or walk by the football field multiple days a week. I could have asked if he wanted to stop by the house. So much at UMD is so different from the last time he was there. So different from when we were students there. The stadium grandstand is much more grand and the field’s artificial turf is a few generations newer. Everyone used to get such bad rug burns. The Stadium Apartments are gone. So much around the stadium is so different from how it was then. The sky above it is the same. The Bagley Nature Area trees are still the same in the same distance. Throwing and catching a football is still …

That’s it. I know when it started — this thing about playing catch. It was on that drive home. But that was in July. Why don’t I remember being conscious of it until September?

Somewhere along Superior Street heading east, maybe between Fitger’s and Sir Ben’s, while trying to maintain composure, I imagined playing catch with my old friend on the old field with the new turf. Standing a little ways away from him, throwing a football back and forth nice and easy. Stopping time. Existing outside of time. Just throwing and catching the ball.