"And good evening to everyone from Miami Gardens, Florida, where in less than three hours Sun Life Stadium is going to be the epicenter of college football with the showdown between the Clemson Tigers and the Ohio State Buckeyes in what is this season's Discover Orange Bowl," the ESPN commentator said from the studio set up in front of the stadium, with the lights of Sun Life already burning in the background.
"And we have to talk about the context of this game, because both teams arrive in very different ways," said the analyst beside him. "Ohio State comes in as the number seven favorite in the country, with Braxton Miller having been one of the most complete quarterbacks of the season and a defense that yielded fewer than twenty points per game in the regular season."
"But Clemson isn't coming in at a bad time," the first responded. "The Tigers finished twelve and two, with a painful loss against Florida State in October that they recovered from in impressive fashion, and they arrive here with Tajh Boyd, who might be the best quarterback Clemson has produced in decades, looking to close out his career with a victory in the Orange Bowl."
"And there's another name people are mentioning a lot this week," the analyst said. "Wyatt Sterling, the freshman who has been one of the biggest surprises of the college season, arriving at this game with numbers no freshman in the ACC has had in a long time."
Outside the stadium, the tailgate had been going on for hours, with thousands of people in the parking lots with grills, flags, and orange shirts competing in numbers against the red and gray of Ohio State, appearing from the ESPN helicopter like a map of colors split into two halves that couldn't quite separate completely.
There was a band playing at some point in the south parking lot, and the smoke from the grills drifted in different directions depending on the wind, while groups of people with face paint walked between the cars with the specific energy level of those who have spent several hours at a bowl game tailgate.
An ESPN reporter forced her way through the crowd, microphone in hand.
"Who wins tonight?" she asked a group in orange shirts, who responded with a collective shout before one said, "Clemson from start to finish."
"Ohio State has a defense Clemson hasn't seen all season," a man in a Buckeyes cap responded from the group next to them. "Boyd is good, but Braxton Miller is different."
"Boyd broke the ACC touchdown record," someone else said.
"Records don't win games."
Social media had been trending with the game for hours.
@CFBNation: Ohio State favored by 2.5 points, but Clemson comes in with more momentum. Watkins vs OSU's secondary is the matchup of the year. #OrangeBowl
@TigerNation_official: DEATH VALLEY IS IN MIAMI TONIGHT 🔥 #ClemsonvsOSU #OrangeBowl
@BuckeyeNation: Braxton Miller has a leg the Tigers can't contain. OSU in 3. #GoBucks
@CollegeFootballTalk: If Wyatt Sterling steps in tonight, things get complicated for Ohio State. That freshman isn't afraid of anything. #OrangeBowl2014
@ESPNCollegeFootball: The 2014 Orange Bowl kicks off in two hours. Who has Clemson, and who has Ohio State? 🏈 #OrangeBowl
Inside the Bus
Clemson's bus left the hotel for Sun Life with the punctuality Dabo demanded for all team departures, and inside, the atmosphere was completely different from the stadium parking lot.
Nobody spoke.
It wasn't the uncomfortable silence of people who have nothing to say to each other, but the other kind of silence—the one that settles in when a group of people has been working toward the same point for months, and suddenly that point is three hours away, with nothing left to say that hadn't already been said in practices, film sessions, and strategy meetings over the last few days at the Miami hotel. There, the team had arrived the previous day and spent the first two days of the year watching film on Ohio State and working on specific plays for Braxton Miller and the Buckeyes' defense, which, according to defensive coordinator Brent Venables, was the best Clemson had faced all season, including Florida State.
Tajh was in the front row with his headphones on and his jaw set, staring straight ahead without moving, possessing that concentration Wyatt had learned to recognize over the past few months as the sign that he was completely inside the game before the game had even started.
Sammy was beside him with his arms crossed and his eyes closed.
Laquon, three rows back, had his head against the window, watching the Miami lights pass by.
Vic Beasley, with his headphones around his neck and his elbows on his knees, kept his eyes fixed on the floor.
Some of them were playing their last game in this jersey, and Wyatt knew it, and they probably thought about it too, though nobody said it out loud because saying it minutes before kickoff served no purpose.
Wyatt was in the back half of the bus by the window, wearing his own headphones, listening to music that was playing without him really hearing it, because his mind was somewhere else.
What he saw was a table in a small cafe in Cambridge that Blaire had picked because, according to her, the coffee there was the only one worth having within a reasonable radius—something Wyatt wasn't going to argue, partly because the coffee was good, and partly because Blaire, in her dark green flannel and Doc Martens with her hair down, sitting across from him arguing whether Breaking Bad or The Sopranos was better television, was reason enough to agree with any location choice.
They had spent three hours in that cafe without either of them really noticing.
Blaire had ordered a black Americano and Wyatt a latte, to which she had given him a look that Wyatt completely ignored and that Blaire couldn't maintain for more than three seconds before the corner of her mouth twitched the way it did when something amused her and she didn't want to show it.
Three hours talking about things in no particular order, with Blaire explaining why Thomas Hardy was an author who took unnecessary pleasure in the suffering of his characters, and Wyatt telling her he hadn't read Thomas Hardy, and Blaire looking at him with an expression of genuine horror before telling him that was a problem they would have to resolve eventually.
Eventually.
That word had floated between the two of them for the rest of the afternoon.
They had walked through Cambridge after coffee in the December cold that Blaire completely ignored in her flannel with her hands in her pockets, and that Wyatt endured with the discipline of someone who doesn't want to admit he's cold, because doing so would mean ending the walk earlier, and Wyatt had no intention of ending that walk early.
They had stopped at a second-hand bookstore Blaire knew, where she spent fifteen minutes browsing the shelves with the concentration she put into everything she genuinely cared about, emerging with a paperback edition of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles. She pressed it into Wyatt's hands, saying, "So you can resolve the problem," and Wyatt looked at her, then looked at the book, then looked back at her, but Blaire was already walking toward the bookstore exit.
The book was in his bag right now, under the seat of the bus, with the receipt from the bookstore still inside marking the first page because Wyatt hadn't gotten around to opening it yet—though he wasn't clear if that was because he hadn't had time or because opening it implied reaching the end, and reaching the end implied starting the next one, which was a conversation he hadn't had with Blaire yet about what came after Framingham.
What he was going to think about were the details of what happened afterward at the hotel he had booked when they both arrived and disappeared behind the door that led straight into the room.
What he could say was that when he took the taxi to the airport at five in the morning, he had left Blaire sleeping in bed with her hair messy, wearing a shirt that wasn't hers.
That memory was also right there on the bus as Wyatt kept his gaze lost on the buildings slowly passing by on the way to the stadium where he would play his biggest game to date.
He unlocked his phone.
The messages had arrived at different moments over the last few days, and Wyatt had saved them without answering all of them, intending to read them together at some point on the way to the stadium, which was exactly where he was now.
His father had sent one that read: "play well" with no period at the end, which was exactly how he would say it in any situation, because his father didn't need more words than those to say everything he had to say, and Wyatt had spent nineteen years learning to read those two words correctly.
His mother had sent a full paragraph with exclamation marks in every sentence and the promise that the whole family was going to watch the game from home with his grandparents and Max, and that she would have his favorite food ready for when he returned—as if returning from an Orange Bowl to find enchiladas on the table were the natural order of things, which in Elena Sterling's house it probably was.
Rudy had sent four words: "don't miss any passes"
Wyatt read that twice before scrolling down.
Caitlyn had sent a voice message that Wyatt hadn't listened to yet, because he knew what he was going to hear, and that wasn't exactly the energy he needed before kickoff; but he would listen to it on the flight back.
Adam from Katy: "If you don't score at least two touchdowns, I'm not talking to you anymore. PS: I will talk to you anyway, but you've been warned."
Laquon, three rows back, had sent him a meme at two in the afternoon of a focused dog looking at the camera that read: "work mode activated."
And the last message was the shortest.
"good luck cowboy"
No name, but Wyatt didn't need a name.
He put the phone in the inside pocket of his team jacket and looked out the window again at the exact moment the bus turned down a wide avenue, and the lights of Sun Life Stadium appeared on the horizon. The massive exterior video board showed the Orange Bowl logo, surrounded by crowds gathered along the perimeter, with the outside sound reaching the bus muffled through the glass like the noise of something about to happen.
Someone on the bus said something in a low voice, another responded, and Coach Swinney from the front didn't have to say anything, because the team had already processed what was in front of them. The silence that returned was different—it was the silence of people who were done thinking.
The bus stopped.
The doors opened.
The Miami January heat hit all at once, completely different from the Framingham cold of four days ago, and for a second Wyatt simply stood there with his bag on his shoulder and the stadium ahead.
Tajh was the first to step off, followed by Sammy, Laquon, the defensive players, and the rest flowing toward the team entrance, with stadium staff clearing a path through the crowd crowding around to catch a glimpse of the players.
Wyatt stepped down and walked with his head down and his headphones hanging around his neck, no longer playing music because he no longer needed music.
The hallway to the stadium locker rooms smelled the same as every stadium since the state championship in Katy at Houston's Reliant Stadium up to Death Valley: grass, concrete, and that other scent with no exact name that Wyatt had learned to recognize years ago as the sign that the work coming next is the only thing that matters at this specific moment.
He walked down that hallway behind Tajh, Sammy, and the rest of the team, with his bag hanging from his shoulder, his footsteps echoing on the concrete, and the stadium noise growing increasingly muffled as they moved deeper into the belly of Sun Life, until Dabo opened the locker room door and walked in first, with everyone else following behind, and the door closed.
The noise from outside disappeared.
Only the locker room, his teammates, and whatever Coach Swinney was going to say in the next few minutes remained before they took the field.
Wyatt placed his bag in his assigned locker, sat on the bench across from it, and stared at the locker room floor for a moment.
Author thought
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