Rock This Stadium in the Twilight Zone

Last night Chad Kimmel and I went to the Boardman-Cardinal Mooney game at Spartan Stadium. Attendance unknown, estimated upwards of 8,500. For those readers of mine outside the Mahoning Valley region, the Spartans and the Cardinals are rivals of mythical proportions, a dying-and-reviving steel town version of OSU-Michigan. The game itself was a three-hour turnover-laden epic, with four injuries in a row (one involving a gurney) in the fourth quarter, ending in a 23-17 Mooney win. The Boardman Band is still as bombastic as Mooney's is embarrassing. C-Dog is the same as ever, a man bursting with love and spirit who says the same thing twice in one sentence. But to be honest, when not talking to Chad, I found it very hard to pay attention to the game.

Besides occasional visits with old teachers, I had not gone to any Boardman events since the summer of '05 and the opening day game where Marc marched in the band, and the Winter Orchestra Concert two years before. There was a measure of continuity. Last night, I felt like I had wandered into an episode of The Twilight Zone where everything was familiar and everything had changed.

Same stadium, same Roman toilets, same gigantic scoreboard, same track where I ran embarrassing thirteen-minute miles in middle school, same BCMS where I would duck through the archways, run up the grand staircase facing the Southern Park Mall, and dash for the bus at 3:35 every afternoon for four years in the old nineties. But the people…the people aren't the same. Well, there was an unsettling familiarity observing the football players and the cheerleaders and the Boardman students in the stands. They looked like hiemlich versions of everyone I remembered from my high school years, not exact replicas, but all the old "types" being passed on to another generation. However, none of my old classmates save Mark Wilson were in recognizable attendance, and no teachers either. We might all be getting too old. Leaving for different, greener or browner pastures. Or time might have wrought on us long enough that every moment is now a memory so distant that the particulars have faded, and we're all murky shades lurking in the unconscious. C-Dog said about the same thing.

When I left Boardman for that lonely freshman year at Emerson, I thought my high school years would stay with the sharp etchings of a Dore piece, the most vital moments of my life. I was wrong. Europe in three and a half months told me more about myself than four years, and Los Angeles completed a metamorphosis worthy of Samsa. The values are different, the landscape has become not my own but THEIRS, their own personal testing ground, which may tie them closer to their home or give them the first energy needed to break free, as I did. So maybe the dispossession of last night was a great thing…more of my peers have also found new worlds, new peace.

The alma mater to "Finlandia" still lumps up the old throat though. Through toil and strife, we will remember thee.