Two days after Thanksgiving, Syracuse and Wake Forest will strap up for a seemingly meaningless football game. At 4-7, Syracuse is all but eliminated from bowl contention. For 8-3 Wake Forest, any outcome still results in a bowl game appearance but not a spot in the conference championship. 

The game’s final score is in many ways irrelevant, but that doesn’t mean the game, and the moments before and after, will be. At least not for Syracuse’s seniors. 

After losing to Louisville last weekend, the Orange need a miracle, including several teams denying bowl bids, to extend their season to December. That means for 22 seniors, Saturday could be their last time playing competitive football. In an otherwise lost season, one that was expected to be so much more, the potential final curtain call of their football careers provides significance to an otherwise inconsequential Saturday. 

Sure, there’s always the NFL, but only 14 former Orange players have been drafted since 2010. Maybe there’s the Canadian Football League or arena football. Perhaps random spring leagues will continue to pop up. 

Regardless, those games won’t be the same. Just ask Dino Babers. His last football memory remains a few plays on a bum knee at the end of a Canadian preseason game, which culminated in him being cut without compensation.

So now Babers is forced to coach instead of play. Football isn’t like most sports. There’s no emulating an 11-on-11 scrap with helmets and shoulder pads. No beer league softball or Sunday morning pickup basketball runs. When football careers end, they end for good. 

“I love football too much,” senior Kenneth Ruff said about continuing to play somewhere. “I don’t want to let it go.”

Max Freund | Staff Photographer

The truth is, I never wanted to let football go either. I grew up on the field, performed well enough to play low-end college but chose Syracuse and journalism instead. 

Over the past month, as this Syracuse season solidified itself as a disappointment, it reminded me of my last season of football. We finished 5-6, Mansfield High School’s worst finish since at least the turn of the century. 

I’ll never forget the tears that rolled down my face after a blown lead on Thanksgiving Day officially made it a losing season. I wasn’t just losing a football game that day, I was losing a passion I’d been committed to longer than anything else in my life.

The emotions poured out to match my grandfather’s. He’d been there before too. Football was ending and a shaking hug from Grampy was keeping it alive for just a few moments longer. I wanted that final postgame embrace on the football field to last forever. The bus ride home wasn’t long enough either. Nor were the parting words from Coach Redding. 

Throughout all of it, the shoulder pads stayed on. When they came off, it’d all be over. I wasn’t ready for that, not yet. 

So now I’m writing, hoping to see the athlete I can never be again, and truly never was, in the players I’m covering. They say they want to stick with the sport too, perhaps coach or find a way to keep playing. 

The games taught them too much to give it up and they’re not sure what they’d do with the free time. Right now they’re busy, caught up in the beautiful monotony of meetings and practice. When it’s over, that all goes away and there’s no way to get it back. 

Evan Adams started playing around the time his dad died during grade school. He was angry back then, he said, and football taught him restraint. The sport showed him there’s a time and place to release his emotions.   

Personal beefs across the line of scrimmage can’t interfere with the team goal. There are too many members on a football team to only worry about yourself. That’s no different in an office or a newsroom.

“The same way I play football is the same way I go about things in life,” Adams said. 

Max Freund | Staff Photographer

I asked Lakiem Williams what he’d remember most when it’s all over. He said it was the bond he built with fellow senior linebacker Andrew Armstrong. They supported each other during Syracuse’s Friday summer conditioning runs that were so hard they wouldn’t want to move for the rest of the weekend. 

I had my own Armstrong, his name was Matt Kashtan. My best friend from a few streets over kept me steady during our “Fun Friday” runs too. He’s the teary-eyed brother I sat with in the locker room on Thanksgiving, delaying our family dinners, unsure why we had to take the pads off. 

I didn’t have the heart to tell Lakiem it’s not the same when it’s just you and your headphones lifting weights at the rec center. 

On the Saturday after Thanksgiving at 12:30 p.m., have a last look at Adams, belly hanging and trash-talk slinging, before he attempts to fold a defender in half. Watch Williams, perhaps the most frequently smiling football player I’ve ever met, chase down a running back in the backfield. See Moe Neal, a staple in the Syracuse offense for four years, search for a final touchdown in the Carrier Dome. 

Enjoy the seniors, all 22 of them, as they finish their final Saturday of football certainty with a crew they’ve been together with for the majority of college, a time period many recall as the fondest of their lives. 

Lost seasons will exist in the history books forever. But it’s the things that happen within them that are truly memorable. 

As the seniors stroll the Carrier Dome field one last time during the senior walk after the game, none of the results will matter. It’s just a final moment to take it all in. A final moment, to keep those pads on their shoulders just a little bit longer. 

Because once the pads come off, they’ll never come back on, no matter how much we wish they could. 

Josh Schafer is a senior staff writer for The Daily Orange where his column appears occasionally. He can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @Schafer_44

Published on November 26, 2019 at 6:09 pm