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NOTES FROM A KEEPER
 The Umbrella Ups and Downpour Downs of Life as a Keeper Leaguer
by Michael E Lawrence
15/11/2007
In my dream, they come at me again and again, LT and AP, running, cantering, moonwalking and even somehow backstroking over the goal line.
I awake in a sweat, believing I have lost 500 to nil, that the season, the playoffs, the championship, have crumbled before me, that it’s in the tank, all of it.
It is Sunday morning.
Later today, my Prophets will play the Otley Cowboy Haters, league champions, a powerhouse of unparalleled proportions, in a game we have to win. Apart from Tomlinson and Peterson, the league’s two best running backs, they have Reggie Bush and Larry Johnson sat on the bench, doing the half-time oranges, talking weather.
They are ridiculously explosive, and if we fielded IDPs, mine would be faking injury just to avoid them.
As it is, I pull the covers back over my head and hope for the other dream I sometimes have. The Lucy Liu one.
It doesn’t come.
***
It’s the biggest game this young team has ever played, and at midday eastern time, it’s showing in Romo’s frightened eyes.
Just got to execute Tony, I say.
J-just got to execute, he echoes, uncertainly.
But he’s having the kind of year I could only dream of back in Summer, when secretly I presumed Matt Leinart since IR’d and then traded by yours truly would be our guy.
Romo has come on in leaps and bounds, and the shy, Clouseauesque mishap machine has become a leader and big time perfomer when it counts most.
On cue, he thwocks his funny bone on the desk edge and writhes in pain.
Still, as Romo goes, so go the Holybourne Prophets in 2007. He’s made the song his own, as Louis Walsh would say.
And I, Simon Cowell to Romo’s Leona Lewis, can’t help but feel a twinge of pride.
I pull my waistband extra high and I say to him:
You’re the best quarterback in this entire competition Tony. Go get ’em.
***
If you’d told me Sunday we were going to win, I’d have hyper-ventilated and crumpled to the floor, but by God, win is precisely what we do.
Romo destroys the Giants, Marshawn tramples the Dolphins. The others grind out yardage and bonuses that put a solid, if unspectacular, 47 points on the board.
I watch astonished, disbelieving, elated and, sure, a little smashed, as the peppy Prophets dig their desperate nails into the ledge of a precipitous four point lead that will not, cannot be toppled.
None of our opponents’ cosmos of stars not LT, not AP, not Adam Vinatieri, not Marques Colston, not Vernon Davis, not Larry Fitzgerald can traverse the small but certain margin that measures out victory for the Prophets, and loss for the Haters.
And suddenly, at 6-4, we’re nearly there, the promised land.
If the playoffs were today, we’d qualify, and of our remaining opponents, two out of three have losing records anyway.
Nothing can stop us now.
Archive Articles:
Notes From A Keeper November 6th Fireworks Night
Notes From A Keeper October 22nd A New Hope
Notes From A Keeper October 15th The Smurfs
Notes From A Keeper October 10th Potential
Notes From A Keeper September 30th Prophets vs Jets
Notes From A Keeper September 10th Season Opener
Notes From A Keeper September 1st QB or Not To QB
Notes From A Keeper August 10th Draft Day
Notes From A Keeper July 13th Draft Strategy
Notes From A Keeper June 17th Cutdown
Notes From A Keeper May 20th Off Season
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