The roster is set

It’s official! Jack brought home jersey No. 15 so now we have two Junior Billiken football players living under our roof. I wasn’t too worried. Jack has always been a pretty good athlete who simply enjoyed participating in soccer and volleyball in the fall, basketball in winter and baseball in the spring.

He played games because that’s what boys do. In between seasons, there were the one-on-one games of basketball on the driveway and/or football toss in the yard with Matt, throwing it like brothers do, pretending they were Kurt Warner to Torry Holt, or Peyton Manning to Marvin Harrison. Along with the SportsCenter play-by-play there was the back-and-forth banter that means absolutely nothing to their parents but everything to them.

“Let me see,” I said, as he walked in the door with a big grin on his face. He first pulled out dirty pants, a bunch of pads and under armour-type undershirts with varying degrees of odor. Then the jerseys — a navy blue with white numbers for home and white with navy blue numbers for away games.

“Nice,” Matt said.

Jack smiled. That was all he needed to hear.

About Leslie McCarthy

Leslie Gibson McCarthy saw her first live football game at the old Busch Stadium in St. Louis, Mo., an annual tilt between St. Louis area high school rivals CBC and St. Louis U. High. She remembers nothing about the game, other than the fact that she sat on the SLUH side and she spent a great deal of time wondering why they put a football field on a perfectly good baseball diamond. 35 years, one husband, two teenagers and a journalism career later, she views a football field as a thing of beauty, and now writes about everything from football to footwear as a former sportswriter and weekly lifestyle columnist for the suburban St. Louis South County Times. Follow the Season of her life here, and read her weekly column at www.southcountytimes.com.

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