I looked at the clock; I could see it plainly, but my mind felt that it was concealing something which had not been grasped, as when things are placed out of our reach, so that our fingers, stretched out at arm’s length, can only touch the football for a moment on its outer surface, and can take hold of nothing long enough to be considered to have completed the catch. Or perhaps when closer to the end zone, we thrust out our arm with refreshed vigor, and try to break the plane of the goal line. But if my mind was thus to collect itself, to gather strength, to develop a strategy for the use of these remaining thirty seconds in the football game, I should have to be alone. What would I not have given to be able to escape as I used to do on those walks along Halas Way, when I detached myself from the rest of the coaching staff! It seemed indeed that I ought to do so now. I recognized that kind of pleasure which requires, it is true, a certain effort on the part of the mind, but in comparison with which the attractions of the inertia which inclines us to renounce that pleasure seem very slight. That pleasure, the object of which I could but dimly feel, that pleasure which I must create for myself, I experienced only on rare occasions, other football teams refer to these as “wins”, but with each of these it seemed to me that the things which had happened in the interval were of but scant importance, and that in attaching myself to the reality of that pleasure alone I could at length begin to lead a new life. I laid my hand for a moment across my eyes, so as to be able to shut them without Mme. McCaskey noticing. I sat there, thinking of nothing, then with my thoughts collected, compressed and strengthened I sprang farther forward in the direction of the locker room, or rather in that inverse direction at the end of which I could see the conclusion of my coaching career. I felt again behind them the same object, known to me and yet vague, which I could not bring nearer. And yet, as the running clock moved on to twenty-three seconds, I could see it moving further away. Where had I seen such a thing before? Not in Landover almost a month ago, certainly.  Nor in Bayonne Verte, a fortnight past.  The thing which it recalled to me, there was no room for it either in the scenery of the dome of the murder of birds where I had gone one week ago to spend some extra time. Was I to suppose, then, that they came from years already so remote in my life that the landscape which accompanied them had been entirely obliterated from my memory, and that, like the diagrams which, with sudden emotion, we recognize in a playbook which we imagined that our quarterback had never studied, they surged up by themselves out of the forgotten chapter of my earliest infancy? Were they not rather to be numbered among those dream gridirons, always the same, at least for me in whom their unfamiliar aspect was but the objectivation in my dreams of the effort that I had been making while awake either to penetrate the mystery of a place beneath the outward appearance of which I was dimly conscious of there being something more, as had so often happened to me on Halas Way, or to succeed in bringing mystery back to a place which I had longed to know and which, from the day on which I had come to know it, had seemed to me to be wholly superficial? Or were they but a concept freshly extracted from a dream of the night before, but already so worn, so altered that it seemed to me to come from somewhere far more distant? Or had I indeed never seen such a things as victories before; did they conceal beneath their surface, like the trees, like the tufts of grass that I had seen beside Halas Way, a meaning as obscure, as hard to grasp as is a distant past, so that, whereas they were pleading with me that I would master the management of clocks, I imagined that I had to identify something in my memory? Or again were they concealing no hidden thought, and was it simply my strained vision that made me see them double in time as one occasionally sees things double in space? I could not tell. And yet as the clock reached seventeen seconds they were coming towards me; perhaps some fabulous apparition, a ring of witches or woodland spirits who would propound their oracles to me. I chose rather to believe that they were phantoms of the past, dear companions of my childhood and collegiate days, vanished friends who recalled our common memories. Like ghosts they seemed to be appealing to me to take them with me, to bring them back to life. In their simple, passionate gesticulation I could discern the helpless anguish of a beloved person who has lost the power of speech, and feels that he will never be able to say to us what he wishes to say and we can never guess. Presently, at a crossroads, I looked up, and there were less than twelve seconds remaining in the game. I watched the prospect of victory gradually withdraw, waving its despairing arms, seeming to say to me: “What you fail to learn today, you will never know. If you allow me to drop back into the hollow of this ruined season from which I sought to raise myself up to you, a whole part of yourself which we were bringing to you will fall forever into the abyss.” And indeed if, in the course of time, I did discover the kind of pleasure and of disturbance which I had just been feeling once again, and if one evening⁠—too late, but then for all time⁠—I fastened myself to it, of that feeling itself I was never to know what it had been trying to give me nor even whether such a thing as triumph could exist for this wretched franchise. And when, the ball having been snapped and the desperate pass having fallen to the turf, uncaught, without a single yellow flag thrown to provide any kind of respite, I turned my face upwards to see all of the digits of the clock reading zero, with Mme. McCaskey asking me what the fuck was I doing, why the fuck had I not called time out, was I some kind of febrile incompetent imbecile, jesus fuck what the fucking fuck was wrong with me, I was as wretched as though I had just lost a friend, had died myself, had broken faith with the dead or had denied my God.