Ten: Uhhhhhhhh

Juice: you got it

nine you should know: your sis is better at tracking than i ever was

Nine: Doesn’t look like it.

Ten: Shh! Just rusty is all. I just woke up.

Juice: just turn on the state boundaries

Ten: Fine. I don’t need them, but fine.

Nine: Wow. I never really noticed it before, but Florida really looks like crap.

Juice: how so

what would you change about it

Ten: HA!

Got ‘em.

Juice: WOOOOO shit lady you threw a DART

fuckin beautiful

Ten: They haven’t gotten far at all. Tough navigating the suburbs, I’m sure.

Juice: especially carrying nine footballs

Ten: Oh yeah, that explains the backpacks.

Juice: you know, when we were drawing up this game we thought about making bags illegal. in the end we decided to allow em. kinda regret that now, it’d be fun to see em bumble around georgia with armloads of footballs

at one point i also wanted to replace the football with a glass of lemonade. don’t spill the lemonade! who doesn’t enjoy a glass of delicious lemonade

Nine: Do you even care about gameplay experience?

Juice: i think it’s very, VERY obvious that i don’t

anyways let’s listen in

Nine: On their private conversation? I wanted to say something earlier. I don’t feel good about that.

Juice: nah it’s fine, all the players agreed to be mic’d up

whenever this game actually ends it’s gonna make for the best documentary series of all time

besides you know someone out there’s probably listening in on us. guaranteed

Radio: –bzzZZZZzZt–

Manny: No, see, that’s 3212 Forest Run. The stucco house, that’s 3214 Forest Run.

Nick: Wait, is this Forest Run Drive or Forest Run Trail?

Manny: Forest Run Drive.

Nick: Who named these goddamn streets? We gotta get out of this state.

Okay, here we go.

We’re right ... here. Right about on the 53,900th yard line.

Nick: Oh, this snuck up on me. Safe house is only about … 500 yards out from us. 600 yards out.

Manny: Feel like we should move, we’re a little exposed here.

Nick: Should be okay, I don’t see anyone out and around right now. As long as we can make it past #3 up there.

Manny: Think they’re out gardening?

Nick: Nah, if I remember right they grow a lot of squash mostly.

Manny: Which means what?

Nick: It’s October. You think they’re planting squash in Georgia in fuckin’ October?

Manny: Why would I know that? WHY would I know that?

Nick: Because you’re playing in Georgia and you’ve been playing in Georgia for 30 years and you have to know this kind of shit! I send you shit to read all the time and you never read it!

Juice: lol there they go again

i think we’re done here

Manny: Listen, I don’t hit you over the head with all the shit I know. I know all about chess, but I don’t spend all day going like oh, Nick, what’s a back rank mate? What’s a Réti’s mate? What’s a smothered mate?

Nick: It’s about to be you in a minute.

Radio: –bZZZZzZZZZzt–

Juice: they’re wild, man. people just don’t change. they don’t ever change

Ten: PAGE 31,407?

Juice: yeahhhh

they were stuck in that condo for 30 years and didn’t have much else to do but scout the field

Ten: This game sucks so fucking bad, man. Everything I’ve seen so far is tedium. Watching, waiting, marching, sitting around.

Football was supposed to replace war, not emulate it.

Juice: i’d encourage you to give it a shot and watch more of it before you decide it sucks

because while you will invariably conclude that it sucks, your reasons for thinking it sucks might very well change

Ten: Fair. You were gonna tell us about the loophole.

Juice: yes!

i think it’s probably best to back way up here

a few years before this game kicked off in 17804, we issued bowl invites to all the teams, including one that still makes me laugh

haw

Juice: now, technically it would have been possible for hawaii to play. motorized vehicles of any kind are prohibited, but teams are allowed to use rowboats, canoes, et cetera

by the way, lots of fields go over lakes. lake football is fuckin AWESOME and we’ll get to that eventually

anyways, the members of the bowl committee loved my pitch for this game until they realized that including hawaii would make this way, way more of a seafaring game than any of them wanted

and remember, the game doesn’t end until one team has every single football. and since every team gets a football at the start, you can’t really avoid the hawaii problem

after a lot of haggling, they managed to effectively disqualify hawaii by making all ocean territories out of bounds. hawaii withdrew as a result. being a thorough completionist, i was disappointed by this, but i respected their decision

HOWEVER. in making the oceans out of bounds, they effectively kneecapped san diego state. originally, SDSU did have one intersection: this one with stanford

Juice: but if you look off in the distance you’ll see that stanford’s field has to pass through the ocean to get here. once oceans were taken out of play, poof, intersection removed, san diego state had an orphaned field

but unlike hawaii, SDSU refused to withdraw. they lobbied for every rule they could think of. they wanted to re-draw their field so it bent at an angle. of course i firmly opposed that because it would have compromised the comically literal spirit of the game

so then they wanted to open up Mexico so their field could go a little further south and make an intersection, but Mexico wanted no part of it

then they tried to make air travel legal. which would have been cool, but it was a particular variant of stupid that didn’t interest me as much

they couldn’t push anything through. but the fact remained that they had a football and they weren’t giving it up. we had to find a way to make SDSU somehow accessible without jeopardizing the spirit of the game. and THAT is why i came up with

OUT-OF-BOUNDS TIME, or OBT.

this is how out-of-bounds works. if you step out of bounds, or you’re shoved out of bounds, you have exactly 10 seconds to return to the field of play. if you fail to do this, you are automatically and permanently ejected from the game. no exceptions

now since it was clear from the jump that this game was gonna take centuries, you can imagine how much of a bummer this can be for players and fans. because i mean, in certain spots it is actually real easy to fall off the field. take, for example, the fresno state 1,430,760 yard line north

Juice: sucks ass! sucks real bad! you’re on such a slant that you could trip, fall down the mountain, and not make it back in time. what if you’re a star running back and this happens to you?

i mean, imagine how much of a damn zealot you have to be to play this game for, i don’t know, a thousand years. then you take one wobbly step and it’s all gone. your whole life, whole identity, gone

to help mitigate the odds of this happening, i introduced out-of-bounds time. OBT is simple: for every year you spend on the field, you are granted one extra second off it.

Nine: One second per year. So one second per 31,536,000 seconds.

Juice: yeah and i know it doesn’t sound like much, but if you’ve played a thousand years, shit! do the math. you got almost 17 minutes of OBT saved up. more than enough time to make your way back in most cases. this goes a long way toward keeping our best players in the game

Ten: And there’s the loophole.

Juice: you got it

Nick: Damn, that was good.

Manny: Hey, when you’re camping, you’re allowed to cook eggs in the bacon grease. That’s the rules.

Sorry they came out all fucked-up-looking, though. Cast iron skillets aren’t good for eggs.

Nick: I don’t care what they look like, really. Gimme your plate?

Manny: Oh. Thanks.

Whoa whoa hey, what are you doing?

Nick: What?

Manny: You’re not supposed to use soap on a cast-iron skillet.

Nick: It doesn’t matter.

Manny: It does!

Nick: No it doesn’t. You know my whole thing on this.

Manny: What’s that?

Nick: Every few years some article comes out that says, “Listen folks, I see you out here washing your cast-iron skillets with soap. No. Just no.” Then someone else will write something that’s like, “yes you can.” Then someone’s like “we performed an experiment to see who’s right once and for all!” but you don’t remember what they found out.

Nobody knows who’s right and people just internalize the last thing they read and forget about the whole thing. Then a few years later this happens all over again. This has happened for 18,000 years.

Manny: “No, just no” is such a good one.

Nick: I might start saying that again. Just to say it.

Manny: Just to annoy me?

Nick: Either that or “I can’t even.” What the hell? Let’s bring back the 19400s.

Manny: Let’s check out one of the balls.

Nick: I don’t know … we should probably put this fire out soon.

Manny: C’mon, the backfield’s empty. No one’s coming back this way.

We said one. We said every night we could check out one of them.

Nick: All right, yeah.

Wanna pick one?

Manny: I dunno, just reach in the bag and take one.

Nick: I can’t believe we got nine of ‘em.

Manny: It feels so fuckin’ weird, man. This is like … I mean, how many times has a ball carrier carried this many? Has it ever happened?

Nick: I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s never happened.

Manny: And even if it did, it was probably some big 50-person unit or something. We’re just two dudes.

I mean, what do we do if we run into a defense and we have to line up at scrimmage? What the fuck does that like? What kind of fuckin’ play do we run?

Nick: There’s a reason we don’t have a play for that, right? It’s impossible.

Manny: We are fast, though. Don’t know if anyone’s got more speed than us.

Nick: Here, lemme just …

I’m gonna draw it up. This’ll be funny.

Manny: Oh God.

Nick: How many defenders are we running into?

Manny: Uhhhh …

I mean, once word gets out these balls are missing, everybody’s gonna send everybody after us.

Let’s say a hundred.

Nick: I’m not gonna draw a hundred.

Manny: Fifty, then.

Nick: Yep.

Nick: Well, uh

Manny: Hahaha fuck!

Nick: This is enough for 14 on the line, 26 in the secondary, seven way back in a sort of prevent defense, and then … just for the hell of it, if I were them, I’d put three more a few hundred yards back just for safety. Have them hide in the trees or something and ambush us.

Manny: Well, we got just enough people to snap a football.

Nick: All nine, though. You’d have to snap all nine. So that means no shotgun.

Manny: Jesus, we did not plan for nine. All those years. I mean I remember a couple times, remember I said to you, “what if there’s two or three?”

Nick: Can’t believe they’d be that stupid.

Manny: They just … it’s like we said. They got sloppy. They thought there was no way a player could make it into Atlanta without getting made.

Then what probably happened is, they found out about another ball out there and just sent the whole house after them.

Nick: Well, hope they get that one. Pretty soon they’ll be missing every one of these.

Manny: Come on, let’s see one.

Nick: All right, lemme see if I can figure out how to work this. Where’s my phone?

Manny: You want me to call it?

Nick: Uhhh, oh. Nah it was right here.

Manny: I think after you open the app, you just have to give it a minute to pair. But it’s gotta be like right next to the ball, you gotta hold it right up to it.

Nick: All right.

Okay!

Manny: What’s it say?

Nick: BOWL-ND. This is the Notre Dame football!

Manny: Oh damn.

Nick: They’re one of the goose-eggs, right?

Manny: Lemme pull up the scoreboard real fast.

ND, ND, ND ...

Manny: Yeah, oh yeah, they’re way down there, below us. They’re at zero.

Nick: I feel like they fell to zero real fast, too. Like, first hundred years of the game.

Manny: I think so. They lost this ball early and never got it back. I’ve never once seen them move up the rankings.

Notre Dame used to be good, too! I’m talking like way back, like the 1900s.

Nick: No shit?

Manny: Oh yeah, they won lots of titles in old football. I think anyway.

Nick: I never watched football back then.

Manny: I only really know about ‘em because for some reason they’d be on national TV. Like I’d turn on the game one afternoon and they were playing, even in a year when they weren’t even good. And I’m like, I’m in California, who the fuck is Notre Dame?

Nick: Ohhh you know what I bet I can do?

Look at this. You can hit the History tab and see where it’s been.

Oh shit, look!

Manny: Whoa.

Nick: The lines show everywhere this ball has been, and the dots … I think the dots show every time it was hidden. Or at least, every time it stayed in the same place for a while.

Manny: Yeah, it’s just like you said. It started at Notre Dame but it only stayed up there for 76 years.

And then stop number 2’s in Louisville … I guess Louisville went and took it?

Nick: Must have, yeah. They took it back to Cardinal Stadium, kept it there for like 400 years.

Then, either someone bum-rushed their stadium and got a turnover, or Louisville decided to try to hide it somewhere else.

Manny: Look at number 3 there, somewhere in southern Illinois. That’s not anywhere near a stadium.

Nick: That would have been in … lemme do the math. Game started in 17804, plus 76 years, plus 414 years, I guess it got to point 3 in the late 183rd century.

Manny: Someone just let it sit there! For 17 years!

Nick: Teams were experimenting with that back then. Just hide it in a tree in the middle of nowhere. Way less secure than stashing it in your stadium obviously, but at least you don’t have a target on your back.

Manny: Stupid.

Nick: Yeah.

Manny: Same time though, that’s how old football was too. When it was first invented, teams would punt on like second down. They cared about field position more than the ball.

Nick: No shit.

Manny: You know that shit is still on the books? If we wanted to, next time we run into a teammate and have to play from scrimmage, we could just punt.

Nick: What would that do?

Manny: Oh, jack shit. Absolutely nothing. I guess they just wanted to stay as true to old football as they could.

Nick: Huh.

Meanwhile we’re eating dinner at the 70,000 yard line.

It’s funny, man.

Nick: The highway’s like, what? A hundred yards away or something?

Manny: About.

Nick: You see these cars go by and you gotta figure, just playing the numbers, that every third person who goes by is a big football fan. If not more, right? Probably more.

And they got no idea that the biggest thing in football is happening RIGHT fuckin’ here. They’re driving right past it.

When I was a little kid my family just had one car. My mom had to drive my dad to work, drive him back home, then later she’d have to go get him again. And his job was like an hour away. And me and my sister were too little to stay at home by ourselves, so we’d have to come along in the car every time.

I’d bring along books and stuff but I’d get carsick looking at them. And a lot of times I couldn’t sleep, so I’d just look out the window. When you’re on the interstate there’s nothing to look at but the trees, really.

I’d try to count the trees, but there are just too many and they go by way too fast. Way too many.

Nick: So then I’d just wonder what those trees were all about. Were they always there? Did somebody have to go plant ‘em all? I mean I was a little kid so I didn’t know this stuff. Was it somebody’s job to go plant those trees?

How far back did they go? What was behind them? Did anyone live back there in a log cabin? What was going on?

Then you get a little older and you just keep your eyes on the road. You got more important things to do and you don’t care anymore. You know it’s just trees.

But now here we are.