CHAPTER ONE
Thanksgiving Day 1991

Ben, Donny, and Gino sat together on the red wooden bench on the sideline in the last football game they would ever play for Derby High School. With his right hand, Ben squeezed into his mouth the little water left from the green plastic bottle. The fingertips of his left hand barely held on to his red helmet; a dirty plaster cast covered his arm—wrist to elbow. 
      Gino and Donny just sat there with their helmets off, their heads between their hands, and their elbows on their knees. Mud obscured nearly every inch of their red and white uniforms. Their war paint, or eye black, as it’s more accurately called, was smudged under their eyes and down their faces. Although the three had left everything they had on the field, they knew that it wouldn’t be good enough, not in Derby. Nobody would remember this game’s score, but no one would ever forget they lost. In a few short minutes, they would be labeled losers forever, and there was nothing they could do about it.
     I leaned on the silver chain-link fence near a back corner of the end zone. I could hear the scoreboard clock behind me slowly and painfully clicking down the time. The Game was about to be finally and officially over. It was the annual Thanksgiving Day game against rival Shelton High School in 1991. Although the weather report predicted a 30 percent chance of snow, the game ended up taking place on a fall morning that was too warm for a heavy coat and too cold for a Windbreaker. The sun glared in my eyes, but I liked where I was standing; it allowed me to make an easy exit from the park whenever I wanted.
     Most of the nearly six thousand fans were continuing to make their way out Derby’s Leo F. Ryan Memorial Field to beat the traffic. Almost all of the people leaving before the game clock reached four zeros were Derby fans. Many were trudging through the open gates wearing red, making their way to their cars without ever looking back at the field. They couldn’t bear to watch Shelton’s players and fans celebrate on their field. Soon the Shelton faithful would drive through Derby’s streets with their horns beeping, orange and black pompons waving out their decorated car windows, screaming that Shelton is number one.
     The chain links atop the fence bar dug through my red jacket into my forearms. The metal barrier and the cinder track prevented me from getting any closer to the uncovered bench. Twenty feet away from the fence that surrounded the field, assistant coaches, police officers, and others lucky enough to obtain a red field pass walked past the three players on the bench without saying a word. I wondered what I would say to them if I were on the bench with them, but it was not my time, not my season.
     People want to remember success, forget about failure. Even a child knows he does not want to be the one holding the wonder ball or the one without a chair when the music stops. Perhaps we feel that way as children because winners are admired and accepted. Perhaps it’s because it makes them feel they’ve achieved a bit of immortality—to gain something nobody else has. Or perhaps it’s because winning makes the pain of life go away, even if only for a moment. When you’re part of a team, if you put the team’s goal ahead of your own, the reward can be everything that’s good about life: friendship, comradery, loyalty, a connection that lasts forever.
     The outcome of a single event can change a person forever. It isn’t the losers who are remembered; it’s those who make a monumental effort that go down in the annals of history. Dorando Pietri is remembered for the way he finished the 1908 Olympic marathon: collapsing after entering the stadium, getting up, taking a wrong turn, collapsing again, and finishing—only to be disqualified for being helped across the line. I remember Gabriella Anderson-Schiess’s stiff right leg and limp left arm as the exhausted marathon runner lurched past the finish line in the 1984 Olympics. We admire most, however, the loser who persists and finally wins against the odds. He is most extraordinary.
     I turned from my thoughts back to the players on the bench. These three seniors had been taken out of the game to allow the underclassmen, who mostly sat on the bench, a reason to get their uniforms washed. Sometimes I think it’s a strategy coaches employ in hopes that the team that’s killing you will follow suit, remove its regulars from the game, and have mercy on you. They usually don’t until you take the first step and take your starters out. That’s the risk a loser has to take. This strategy sometimes makes the final score look closer than the game actually was. In this game, it wouldn’t have mattered how close the final score was.
     It was the ultimate disgrace for the three seniors. It was bad enough they were losing to Shelton on their home field, but now they would be on the bench when the final whistle blew and the siren from the red and white ambulance parked below the scoreboard blared, marking the end of an era. You see, in Derby, the smallest town in Connecticut (only 5.3 square miles), football was life.
     Every boy in this blue collar town dreamed of playing football for the Red Raiders of Derby High School. The city didn’t have much else going for it, only the pride in its successful high school football program. Most years, unemployment in Derby was higher than the state average, and what was left of Derby’s manufacturing base was slowly waning out. For years, small downtown stores were closing in favor of department stores in larger cities. The City’s downtown buildings were decaying; reconstruction was prone to politics and wasn’t well planned. If Derby lost one of its rival football games, the mayor would worry he might not get reelected. The townspeople would have to blame somebody.
For many years, the football games were played before a few thousand people, except for games against rivalries, in which the crowds reached nearly ten thousand fans. For a town of just more than twelve thousand people, everybody who read an Evening Sentinel, bought his smokes at the United Cigar Storeor the Bridge Smoke Shop, sipped cappuccino at Durante’s Market, ate breakfast at Connie’s Cucina,or ordered a pizza by delivery from a Derby phone attended the games. Those who couldn’t attend listened as the local radio station, WADS, broadcast the games.
     Whenever Derby scored a touchdown, someone lit the wick of a small red and white cannon in the back of the north end zone near the scoreboard. If you attended a game and didn’t realize Derby scored, you could be startled off your gray pine bleacher seat. White smoke, along with the pungent scent of black powder, crept across the field for the next ten minutes, constant reminders to the visiting team that they had given up a touchdown.
     During most home games, a short, stout man dressed as an Indian with an authentic red, white, and brown war bonnet and wearing red, yellow, and black war paint made a grand entrance. With one hand gripping a dry leather rein and the other a turkey-feathered lance, he rode down a hill behind the adjacent baseball field’s rusted backstop on a horse with a frayed blanket on its back. The brown and white spotted stallion clopped its way to the cinder track before Derby’s stands, and its silent rider raised the lance to acknowledge the raucous cheering of Derby fans. The horse stopped behind the team’s bench, and the Indian warrior motivated the team.
     I glanced toward the baseball field, behind the opposite end zone. Traditionally while the high school game carried on, younger kids played their own tackle football game. They played on the diamond during each football game until the day they were able to play on the big field. Until last year, nobody had seemed to care that these games chewed up the baseball field’s infield. The city finally resodded the infield and roped it off during football games. But that didn’t stop the game-during-the-game from taking place; it just moved the game into left field. As I looked across the field, I noticed the kids were already dispersing to go home with their parents.
     I turned around and noticed month-old campaign flyers with black and white pictures of smiling candidates littering the tarred entranceway leading from the north gate to the Ryan Field complex down the path behind me. Derby fans followed the same path to reach the gray wooden bleachers supported by aging concrete that covered the side of a pine and maple tree-filled hill for the football field’s entire length. Several flyers whipped up against the double gate portion of the chain-link fence the ambulance used whenever it traveled on the cinder track surrounding the field to get to a team’s bench. At the north entrance, candidates for state or municipal office sometimes passed out campaign literature and shook hands. Fans sometimes grumbled as they walked past them, as if the politicians violated the game’s sanctity and hindered them from securing a good seat.
     Twenty minutes before the annual Thanksgiving Day game between Derby and Shelton kicked off, each town’s politicians, along with each school’s representatives, gathered at midfield as if they were at a summit. After they shook hands and returned to their respective sides of the field, the warm-up began. Derby’s mascot, an alumnus or student dressed in full Indian garb waving a wood and stone axe, would have at it with the Shelton mascot on the home team’s emblem, painted on what was left of the midfield grass after a long season. Since Shelton’s nickname was “the Gaels,” it was always someone dressed in a Viking outfit. The mascots warmed up the cold crowd before the main event. The Indian tackled the ox-horn helmeted Viking and then the Viking tackled the Indian or vice versa, so each team’s fans could alternately cheer. They terminated the ritual after the fights became real, not staged.
     From 1967 through this game in 1991, Derby’s winning football tradition amassed three overall state championships, seven undefeated seasons, and multiple Housatonic League championships. After the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Association instituted divisional state championship games based on a school’s enrollment in 1976, Derby won two of those as well. For a school of Derby’s size, the number of all-valley, all-Housatonic League, and all-state players as well as players who excelled at Division I and II colleges and universities was an astounding accomplishment for such a small high school in the Northeast. But the most important record achieved was that—since 1963—Derby had never had a losing season. The torch had been passed each of the past twenty-eight years to Raiders who had endured the sacrifices necessary to ensure the continuation of the “Streak.”

CHAPTER TWO
Big Lou’s Reign

Derby’s coach, Charlie DiCenso, finally stopped pacing up and down the mud-laden sidelines between the forty-yard line markers. He removed his red cap with a white D and ran his left hand through his curly light brown hair. With puffed cheeks and tightened lips, he let out a long breath while squeezing his cap’s bill. He put his cap back on, revealing the half dollar-sized gold ring with the ruby-red stone on his right hand he had received last year when he brought the city another state football championship. He adjusted the cap with both hands, leaving the bill just above his metal-rimmed glasses.
     Although Charlie tried to pull off another miracle underdog upset against the orange and black of Shelton High School, it wasn’t going to happen today. A 5–6 season would be the best he could do. One year ago to the day, he had used a dirty white towel to wipe the Gatorade off his face before speaking to reporters about the upcoming state playoffs. Tomorrow he would be known as the coach who couldn’t carry on the Streak.
     The Streak had started just before the arrival of legendary coach Lou DeFilippo. Prior to Coach DeFilippo’s reign, a winning tradition had already been in its infancy with Coach Ron Carbone, then with Bill McAllister. After four years, Ansonia , an adjacent city and another of Derby’s archrivals, stole Carbone, and the rivalry hardened. The following year, Carbone left Ansonia to coach at Hamden High School and Ansonia stole McAllister after his undefeated 8–0–1 first year. After McAllister left, Derby searched for a new football coach who would continue the winning ways of his two predecessors. When the search began, Derby learned an overqualified coach named Louis DeFilippo was interested. Derby had gotten lucky.
     Big Lou was a giant of a man as well as a giant of a person. He had been a lineman for the New York Giants from 1941 to 1947, with a stint in between with the Navy during World War II, and had been an assistant coach with the Baltimore Colts. He had also been an assistant coach at Purdue, Fordham, and Columbia universities.
     Before his professional playing days, he had snapped the ball from center for the Fordham University Rams. In 1941, he was the team’s captain and played in the Cotton Bowl with—as legend has it—one of the versions of the famous Seven Blocks of Granite. Years later, he was inducted into the Fordham University Athletic Hall of Fame. The legendary Green Bay Packer coach Vince Lombardi had played at Fordham on the 1937 version of the Seven, and it was sometimes rumored that Big Lou was on it with him. It was more than rumor; he had been Vince Lombardi’s friend, and was acquainted with many professional football players and coaches.
     Prior to coming to Derby, Big Lou had coached football at East Meadow High School on Long Island. While coaching East Meadow from 1961 to 1968, he compiled a 46–9–1 record and won five straight league championships from 1963 to 1967. In 1964, his team won the Long Island Championship, and he was voted Coach of the Year by the Long Island Press. In 1967, the East Meadow Kiwanis Club honored him as its Citizen of the Year.
     While at Derby from 1968 to 1982, his teams had compiled a record of 116–30–8, with undefeated seasons in 1968, 1969, 1972, 1973, and 1975. The 1969 and 1973 teams had earned recognition as Connecticut’s overall champion. Honored as Coach of the Year by the National Football Foundation in 1972 and by the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference (CIAC) in 1973, he was also inducted into the Connecticut Coaches Hall of Fame. He received the Gold Key Award from the Connecticut Sports Writers’ Alliance, and was their High School Coach of the Year in 1975 as well as the New Haven Grid Iron Club’s Coach of the Year in 1982. [i]
     Lou was loved not only by the football players and coaches who knelt in pews together at an early morning mass at St. Mary’s Church before each game, but by everyone else in town. He didn’t demand respect, but commanded it. His knowledge of the game of football was unsurpassed among his peers. On the high school level, only a handful of coaches in Connecticut could come close. Big Lou’s personality could motivate anyone to do better than they would ever think possible. Lou’s credo was simple, yet powerful: never quit. Whenever he voiced those words, you would think he had made the phrase up. Maybe he had.
Besides coaching football at Derby High, Big Lou was the boys’ gym teacher. During phys ed classes, he pounded that same phrase into the young minds who wore the required DHS white gym shirts and red shorts. Even those who didn’t play football still called him coach. Some students got jealous of the treatment football jocks received. On Fridays before each game, they were allowed to wear their game jerseys in school. Every other male had to wear a collared shirt and tie.
     Those on the team were exempt from taking gym; instead they were allowed to go into the weight room and lift. If a football player was nursing an injury, he could spend the class in the cylindrical stainless steel whirlpool in the windowless ten-by-ten room adjacent to Lou’s office. Exemption from one of Coach’s gym classes was no small reward; sometimes the students were lucky to survive the forty-two-minute session. Unless you were on the football team, there was no excuse good enough to miss his class. If you told him you forgot your jock, he would tell you to go get a peanut shell and rubber band. If you told him your jock had broke, he simply grabbed a stapler and clicked it back together for you.
     In addition to the usual sports, phys ed included everything from tumbling, wrestling, and gymnastics to marine drills. In the gymnastics segment, one of the suicidal events we had no choice but to line up for was to bounce off a spring board, leap over a set of oak parallel bars with a light blue mat laid over them, then tumble and roll on a floor mat 1.25 inches thick. Though spotters always stood by with their hands spread, you wouldn’t count on them to save you from being carried to your next class.
     We even played the traditional sports in gym class, such as softball, under rules designed to make your spine tingle if you didn’t hustle. Under Coach’s rules, each team used their own pitcher. After the team at bat made three outs, the other red and white team sprinted off the field and tossed one to their hitter; they didn’t have to wait until the new fielding team was ready. If you didn’t hustle onto the field, you could get nailed off the head by a line drive, but nobody ever did. You only got one pitch. You either got a hit or made an out. It was that simple. Unlike normal baseball rules, a foul ball was an out. In a forty-three-minute period, teams could get a full seven-inning game in before heading to the showers.
     Despite the fact you might talk about gym classes while circling an index finger around your ear, there was something about the way you felt after you surviving a class without barfing your lunch. Lou toughened you up. You weren’t allowed to quit.
     If a male student got into trouble at the school, they didn’t suspend him; they simply made him see Coach. A visit to Coach was worse than a suspension. Lou’s voice sounded like a drill sergeant’s. As you stood in line for attendance on the wooden gym floor before jumping jacks commenced, he always barked, “If you quit at anything, you’ll quit at everything. You’ll quit on your team, your school, your friends. You’ll someday quit on your wife and family, and you’ll quit on yourself. Nobody quits in Derby!” Sometimes he emphasized the point. “They may quit in Ansonia, they may quit in Seymour, they may quit in Shelton, but nobody quits in Derby!” I attended Derby High School from 1969–1973 and only played baseball, but I never forgot those words. Big Lou wouldn’t let you.
     Next to Shelton High School, the high schools of the neighboring towns of Ansonia and Seymour were Derby’s biggest rivals. The day before each of those three games, Derby’s students piled whatever crates, skids, and junk wood they could find in town. The pile towered as high as a gooseneck goal post. At night, the pile was torched as players, cheerleaders, and students roared before it. The orange-yellow glow could be seen from the hills of neighboring towns. Shelton and Ansonia High School built their own bonfires to stir their fans into pandemonium. On a clear night before the Shelton game, you could see Shelton’s bonfire as you rubbed your hands together near Derby’s. I’m sure Gael fans also espied Derby’s flickering flames. On one year, before one of those rival games, Derby students even lit the Red Raider bonfire on the adjacent baseball field’s uncovered mound.
     Even the cannon that boomed at home games whenever Derby scored was called Little Lou. Although Little Lou eventually surrendered to safety and health codes, the football field remains named after Big Lou. Following Big Lou’s retirement, Charlie DiCenso, a long-time, loyal assistant, continued Lou’s legacy and started one of his own, achieving one overall state championship in 1990 as well as two Class S state championships. Despite declining enrollment at Derby High after Lou’s departure, the winning tradition and the Streak lived on with Charlie.

CHAPTER THREE
Gino, Donny, and Ben

In 1991, under Coach DiCenso, Gino, Ben, and Donny were not going to escape the tradition or the duty of continuing the Streak. Gino DiMauro III, a senior at the school, was the son of the city’s mayor, Gino DiMauro Jr., and the grandson of Gino DiMauro Sr. He grew up on Eighth Street, which was in a small Italian neighborhood on Derby’s west side. He hung out near a street corner that, for many years, had a bicycle repair shop in the front of an apartment building’s red brick foundation that sold Red Hot Dollars, Pixy Stix, and Atomic Fire Balls for a penny.
     Gino’s father had played football when he had been at Derby High. Gino’s grandfather had been the Indian chief on the horse until he got too old to ride without a saddle. By the time young Gino played, Papa Gino had been elevated from mascot at the football games to membership on the city’s board of education. In Derby, I think that was considered a demotion.
     Gino III, with a blond flattop and sideburns to the bottom of his ear, could barely touch the top of the doorway into the locker room. He couldn’t catch many runners from behind, so he was a lineman. In Derby, a player’s physical size didn’t matter as much as his heart; most years Derby was outsized and outnumbered by its opponents. If you weren’t athletic enough to play a skill position, such as a running back, defensive back, or wide receiver, or if you couldn’t remember the plays, you’d better be able to block. Gino wasn’t all that good at any of it, but at least he didn’t disgrace the family.
     Gino also played baseball. Until his senior year, the highest level he had reached was playing second base on the junior varsity team. Second base is where a coach grooms the following year’s shortstop. Gino could block a ground ball like a hockey goalie, pick it up, and throw it to first base. He struck out more times in batting practice than the rest of the team combined, but at least he swung at strikes.
     When Gino did play second base, though he didn’t wear glasses for his vision, he wore plastic protective eye goggles. Nobody ever heard of a second baseman who wore eye goggles. The light-skinned Gino took a lot of ribbing when he donned them, as their dark edges surrounded his eyes and made him look like a raccoon. I guess he wanted the goggles in case he had to knock the ball down with his round-cheeked face.
     Gino’s nickname was Pizza Box Maker because he, along with Ben, bused tables and sometimes assembled white cardboard boxes at a small Italian restaurant called Roseland just below Ryan Field. Roseland still had wooden booths and an old-fashioned Seeburg jukebox inside. It often had customers waiting out the door. Sometimes, from the fields above, I could smell the garlic from Roseland. Traditionally, the football coaches met there and ate after the games.
     Like Gino, Ben Bartone was a senior. Ben’s father, Ralph, had been an all-Housatonic League guard on Derby’s football team and had been known in his high school days in the 1960s as one tough hombre. Ralph had tried to play basketball, but he had just been the comic relief during many of the junior varsity games he played in, even as a senior. I had attended the junior varsity and varsity basketball games when I was in grammar school. They were played back-to-back in the evening on a local grammar school’s slippery linoleum floor. I can’t recall Ralph ever tapping the scorer’s table to get buzzed into a varsity game. But in Derby you could be a senior and still get away with playing on the junior varsity basketball team. The other teams not only didn’t notice but didn’t care, as it never created any mismatches on the court. Despite the fact Ralph was not all that talented at shooting hoops, no other team’s players ever messed with him on the court.
     Ralph raised his family on Lakeview Terrace. Lakeview was a tight-knit neighborhood on Derby’s far west side off Route 34. Route 34 was known as the River Road since it was adjacent the Housatonic River. Lakeview contained identical two-floor duplexes. On its south side, kids could scratch out four bases with sticks on a small, weed-strewn field. In the summer, Lakeview residents crossed Route 34 to grab a cheeseburger at a snack shack named the End Zone or swim at the Recreation Camp on the river. Lakeview Terrace’s north side outlet was at Hawthorne Avenue, adjacent to 350-acre Osborndale State Park. In its inception, occupancy at one of the duplexes in the Lakeview community was limited to those whose income didn’t exceed bureaucratic guidelines. When Lakeview was built, that was the majority of Derby’s population.
     Ralph’s son Ben was a different kind of athlete. At 5'10" and about 165 pounds, he had been Derby High’s quarterback since his junior year. Like many of Derby’s past quarterbacks, he also played defense as a cornerback. Earlier that season, Ben had shattered his left wrist while making a tackle against North Haven. The Raider faithful had been stunned. The question among the coaching staff had been whether Ben would ever return as the quarterback.
     After Ben’s injury, the team began to lose. Although Derby’s backup quarterback gave it his best, he was not nearly as good as Ben Bartone. As each week passed, the coaches questioned Ben’s desire to return. Only in Derby would that question ever have arisen. Ben watched each game from the sideline with his wrist still encased in the plaster his surgeon had formed over the hardware he implanted. The team was in trouble, and, more importantly, the Streak was in trouble.
     The coaching staff had to decide how to approach the difficult games ahead without Ben. In hindsight, the concern about whether and when Ben might return distracted the team. Without him, the team never got into a rhythm. When Ben did return for the last two games of the season before the Shelton game, they changed the offense when they realized it was still too soon for him to free his wrist from the bone brace. In high school football, it’s hard enough to teach a team one style of offense, let alone two. The coaches implemented a shotgun-style offense for Ben. But he still had to catch the football with one hand in a cast, grip the ball in his right hand, and throw it or hand it off.
     Despite Ben’s return, the team continued to lose, in part because Ben couldn’t control the snap or play defense. With a 5–5 record, they needed to beat three-touchdown-favored Shelton to keep the Streak alive. The Gaels were coming into the game having already wrapped up the Housatonic League championship with an 8–0 league record.
     In addition to playing quarterback, Ben was an infielder and a pitcher on the baseball team. Most quarterbacks in Derby ended up pitchers, but Ben was more than your average high school pitcher or infielder. In fact, he was far better than average. Besides having pitched ever since he was in Little League, Ben played for a Mickey Mantlesummer league team for thirteen to sixteen-year-olds. Many Mickey Mantle team participants paid significant entry fees to play just about every day in a given summer. Some Mantle teams required their players to buy their own uniforms. Similar toBabe Ruthleagues, they had their own state and regional tournaments and World Series.
     As a fifteen-year-old freshman, Ben played third base and pitched on Derby’s American Legion team for sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds, which I coached. When Ben pitched, he averaged only about one walk per game, which in high school baseball gives your team a chance to win, since you can’t defend a base on balls. Nothing bothers a high school baseball coach more than a walk.
When he didn’t pitch, Ben played third base. His swing was smooth, short, and compact—a clinician’s dream—and he possessed good baseball instincts. His junior season, Ben made the Class S all-state team as a third baseman. He also liked to cast a fishing pole for rainbow trout at Picket’s Pond in Osborndale State Park. He was not your typical Derby football player.
     Donny Shepard was also a senior. He lived two blocks from Gino in a single-family house adjacent to some three-floor apartment buildings on Hawkins Street’s south side. The section was about four football fields from where I lived as a kid on Hawkins Street’s northern end. Hawkins Street’s south side was a one-way street until it reached its intersection with Eighth Street. As a kid, I had learned the game of baseball in the crowded neighborhood by playing with taped-up Wiffle balls in small backyards, alleyways, or streets not far fromStork’s Tavern and the Over the Hill Tavern.
     Donny hadn’t played football until his senior season; he had only played baseball. When Lou was the coach, that might not have been possible. If you didn’t play football from your freshman year on, you wouldn’t be allowed to overtake somebody else who had already paid his dues. No one else in Donny’s family had ever played football for Derby High. With declining enrollment, the coaches couldn’t afford to let an athlete like Donny walk the school halls and not play football. They finally persuaded Donny to play.
     The coaches told Donny he could be a wide receiver. Along with another receiver, he would be responsible for