The Long Way Home

We Believe Anyway. — the words of House Jets

Geno Smith lost his place in this house over six hundred dollars.

It was a plane ticket to a camp he had missed because someone close to him had died. A teammate wanted the money back. Smith would not pay it, so the teammate broke his jaw in the locker room. The teammate was released within hours. Smith lost the seat that month and never got it back.

New York traded for him again in the spring. He is thirty-six.

On Sunday, in a hall in Tennessee, he made his first start for this house in ten years. He won it comfortably, and never once had to come from behind.

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The other man with something to settle was on the far sideline, in unfamiliar colours.

Robert Saleh ran House Jets for three seasons and part of a fourth, and was thrown out five games into the last one, which is the kind of dismissal a man never gets to explain. Tennessee hired him in January to stop four straight losing years. This was his first day, and the calendar had handed him the house that fired him.

Both houses won three games last season, and nobody outside two cities had a reason to watch this one.

New York settled it on the ground.

Breece Hall carried it twenty-two times. This house paid a great deal in the spring to keep him doing exactly that, and he had come back to work from a hurt groin only that week — and in five years, only two other afternoons have given him that much ground. Kenyon Sadiq, a squire nobody expects to be carrying the ball at all, was handed it running sideways on the opening march and took it in himself: his first score in the realm. New York never gave the lead back.

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Tennessee’s Reckoner answered early, and then, for most of the afternoon, nothing happened for them at all.

Eight marches in a row. Not one produced anything.

No calamity to point at, which is the quiet horror of it. The ball simply kept belonging to somebody else. New York held it close to two-thirds of the day — one house keeping it from another that badly needed it, march after march, until the clock had eaten the argument.

Cam Ward is in his second season as Tennessee’s lord, and no man of his year was chosen before him — the first name called in the entire realm. On Sunday he could not move anything at all. His house finally scored with the result long since settled.

Nothing broke. It simply never started, and for a house at the bottom that is worse than a disaster, which can at least be repaired.

Smith is thirty-six and has not lost. Saleh lost his first day to the house that discarded him. And New York had not won an opening Sunday since the year the jaw was broken.

Ships of the week: Smith and House Jets, eleven years and one broken jaw later. Villain of the week: whoever wanted his six hundred dollars back. Next week: New York finds out whether a good Sunday is a habit or an accident.