THEY WERE BOTH SO YOUNG.

One would be entering his old age now, with most of a long life behind him. The other would just be entering his senior year in high school, working to fulfill a life of great promise.

A vast gulf of time separates them.

But nobody knows them now except by memory, so time is also what ties them together.

And it is time that tells their story.

They were both so young, are both so young still.

ONE IS JAY KUTNER. He is a quarterback. He plays for Holy Trinity Diocesan High School in Hicksville, New York. He is a senior, 17 years old. He wears No. 5. One afternoon, his team, the Titans, is playing a preseason scrimmage against Amityville Memorial, a public school. It is the second week of September, and the day is hot and dry and dusty, and Jay is walking off the field for a drink of water. He is done, like most of the starters. His backup is already stepping behind center. But he hears the whistle blow. The coach is dissatisfied — execution or effort, it hardly matters now. He tells Jay to go back in for one last play. It has been a rough scrimmage, but Jay is wearing a red outer jersey for his protection. He is not supposed to be hit. He barks the signals, the ball is snapped. The play later will be described as “nondescript” or “routine.” But mistakes are never routine. There is a problem with the snap. The ball comes loose. The ball is on the ground, and Jay dives for it. So does everyone else. The play is not particularly violent, just crowded. There is a pile, and at the bottom of it, a small voice — “my neck.” The whistle blows, and the players peel themselves off of or are pulled from the scrum. They stand up, then they look down. The player at the bottom remains on the ground. The player at the bottom is Jay Kutner, and he does not get up.

The other is Caden Tellier. He is a quarterback. He plays for Morgan Academy, in Selma, Alabama. He is a junior, 16 years old. It is a hot Friday night in August, and he is playing under the lights, first game of the season. Morgan versus Southern. He wears No. 17, in emulation of his hero, Josh Allen of the Buffalo Bills. Most of the people who watched him grow up — the people who know and love him most — have come to the small stadium in the back of the school to watch him play football. His father is here. His mother is here. His sister is here, his girlfriend, his pastor, his coaches, his teachers, his friends. Caden is at home on his home field, with his old Ford truck in the parking lot. He sat out a few games as a sophomore after a shoulder injury. He is healthy now, a rangy kid who is as proud of his legs as he is of his arm. He likes to run. On Morgan’s first drive of the second half, he rolls right, toward his own sideline — toward his team, toward his family, toward the home crowd. He sees an opening along the white stripe and is turning upfield when a diving tackler grabs him low and trips him up. It’s a clean tackle everybody will say. But Caden stretches and sprawls forward, still gathering momentum as he falls. He lands hard, his helmet hitting the turf with a snap. He gets right up, he heads right back to the huddle. But then he takes himself out. He goes to the sideline and takes a knee. He says, “I don’t feel good,” and slumps over.

It’s the last thing Caden Tellier ever says.

YOU CAN’T MISS HIM. He’s good at everything he does — hell, Jay’s good at smiling. On the pitcher’s mound, he throws so hard he wears out the hands of his catchers. On the football field, he stands tall in the pocket and throws a ball his receivers have to either catch or duck. He’s 6-foot-2, 185 pounds and still growing, and though his school, Holy Trinity, sits in the middle of Long Island, he has drawn attention from major college scouts as far away as North Carolina, as well as comparisons to Roman Gabriel, the marble statue who quarterbacks the Philadelphia Eagles.

But it’s in the halls of Holy Trinity where you see his promise most clearly — where young Jay, with his blue eyes and easygoing and yet purposeful gait, looks like a particularly self-possessed politician, somehow already a handshake away from higher office. It’s not just that everyone wants to talk to him; it’s that he can talk to everyone, even the grinds in his Latin class. Yes, when the bell rings, he seems to float above the fray, surveying the scurrying underclassmen as if from a great height. But he also sees things — particularly the kids having a hard time. When the yearbook photographer comes to school to shoot senior portraits, Jay pokes his head in the classroom and sees that his friend Tommy Young doesn’t have a sport jacket. He gives him his own, an unmistakably loud plaid, along with an assurance that when the yearbooks come out at the end of senior year, there they will be for all of posterity, secret twins stuck in the same jacket. And when he sees one of the biggest and most imposing of his jock buddies roughing up the editor of the school paper after a rowdy basketball game — Brian Clancy has written an editorial condemning the cherished Holy Trinity ritual of under-the-bleachers basketball-game boozing — Jay strides over and taps him on the shoulder. “I don’t think this is a good idea,” he says. “I know Brian, and Brian’s a good guy.” His teammate nods, and leaves Brian alone.

Heroism comes naturally to him, but not easily. He’s from an enormous Catholic family, one of 11 children, and his father is the unquestioned hero in the house — the war hero. It is a time in American history when many middle-aged men in many suburban neighborhoods fought in World War II. But Harry Kutner flew a B-29 on bombing missions over the Pacific. He is a lawyer who’s just about to be appointed judge at the Nassau County Family Court, and to his children he’s a judge already, with an inflexible standard of right and wrong and a prickly distaste for the “gray area.” Some fight him, some live in fear of him, but Jay — well, one day a kid from the neighborhood shows up at the front door to object to something Jay has done. They all live near a big public park and the kid, Jim Savage, was playing baseball with his friends when Jay came along with his friends and kicked them off the field. Harry Kutner answers the door, with his tall middle son appearing behind him. When Savage finishes his story, the judge turns to Jay and asks, “Did you do this?”

“Yes, Dad,” Jay answers.

Without hesitation, Harry slaps his son across the face, hard. Jim Savage is horrified, but what he will remember most vividly, what he will remember forever, is Jay’s response. The boy doesn’t cry. He doesn’t even flinch. He just … takes it, as if endurance has already become his calling and his fate.

THE FATHER AND SON, Jamie and Caden Tellier, are also coach and player. They are with each other all the time because Caden wants to be coached all the time — he’s that kid. A pitcher, he keeps a baseball in his hand no matter where he goes, working on different grips for different pitches even when he’s hanging out and watching television. A dual-threat quarterback, he takes pride in studying for games as rigorously as he studies for school, where he can’t abide anything less than an A. He likes baseball better than he likes football, but if baseball is his sport, he knows football is his chance — his chance to keep playing in college. His chance to leave his mark. Caden has always been a boy with dreams, and Jamie has always been a man dedicated to their realization. He played quarterback himself once; he taught Caden how to play the game in their backyard in Selma, and when Caden became a 15-year-old sophomore starter at the Morgan Academy, Jamie joined the coaching staff as a volunteer. He doesn’t have to push Caden because Caden pushes himself. But Caden’s dreams keep growing bigger and bigger, and now he has one that he shares not just with his father but also with his closest friends: He wants to see his jersey retired. In the gym at the Morgan Academy, the jersey of Gunnar Henderson, Class of 2019 and now a shortstop for the Baltimore Orioles, hangs from the wall. Caden wants his garnet-and-gold No. 17 to hang right next to it.

But it is not his only goal. He has worked so hard to prepare for Morgan’s first game of the 2024 season that he wonders if his worldly ambition is getting in the way of his spiritual one. He has been a professing Christian since he was 4 years old, but he has been spending so much time practicing and studying for football that he has been missing the Wednesday night youth group. His youth pastor, Roxanne Jones, is also his godmother, and he has been telling her that his heart is with her but his head is with football, so she’s surprised when he calls one Wednesday night and says he’s coming — “Should I bring a pizza?” He arrives late, pizza in hand, and explains to the group that he doesn’t know why, but he had to come. Then he becomes impassioned. He’s a determinedly soft-spoken kid, but he speaks with such conviction that he causes his pastor to abandon her planned lesson. He might want to see his jersey retired, but what he really wants to see is a spiritual revival of his team. Then he stops himself. “No,” he says, “I want to see a revival at school …”

Two nights later, he leads his team onto the field for a game against Greensboro, Alabama’s Southern Academy, with his father up in the booth calling plays.

THERE SHOULD BE NO PROBLEM with the snap. The quarterback and the center, Jay Kutner and Richie Callahan, are best of friends, one of them tall and the other so squat he’s called “Stumpy.” They’ve practiced the exchange all summer, in preparation for their senior season. Jay has taken hundreds of snaps, until receiving the ball from Stumpy has become second nature to him, just like their friendship. But when preseason begins and the team goes to camp at a nearby seminary, there is a complication. Holy Trinity’s head coach, Fred Bruno, has hired a new offensive assistant, an odd, persnickety man with a crewcut and a deep ideological commitment to the University of Delaware’s wing-T offense. Crewcut sweats the smallest details, even the snap from center. His center and his quarterback exchange the ball as they have since they started playing football, Richie turning the ball on the upswing so Jay can grab it across the laces. Crewcut tells them they’re doing it wrong. He insists on Jay grabbing the ball by the point, a doctrinal choice that’s supposed to help the running game but succeeds only in turning what has been routine into a roll of the dice. The quarterback and the center start fumbling. At first, they are just making mistakes; then they do it on purpose, two friends engaged in a secret rebellion. Finally, the coach surrenders and allows them to go back to what was automatic. They don’t have to think about the snap again until the day of the scrimmage with the Tide of Amityville High School.

It’s Tuesday, the 11th day of September, and it’s getting late in the day, a little past 5 o’clock. The scrimmage has been sloppy and short-tempered, the two teams eager for the season to start and the games to count. Coach Bruno blows the whistle, and Richie Callahan heads to the sideline for water. He’s done. Most of the starters are done, tired and thirsty and taking off their helmets. Richie figures Jay is done too, but when he turns around he sees Jay still on the field. The coaches are yelling and Jay has gone back under center. Richie wants to put his helmet back on and return to the fray — to his quarterback and his friend. It is a strong feeling, one he remembers. But the Titans need a backup center, and the coaches are auditioning a guard named Mark Pospisil. He snaps the ball exactly as the dogmatic coach has instructed, point up instead of the laces. Tommy Young is playing tight end, and he will remember waiting for Jay to throw him the ball. Kevin Kavanaugh is playing running back and he will remember waiting for Jay to hand it off. Richie Callahan is watching from the sideline, and he will remember exactly that — watching as Jay begins to pivot without the ball in his hands, and wishing he could somehow still go in.

The scrimmage is being played on the grass field where the Holy Trinity Titans play their games on Saturdays. It is a few hundred yards from their locker room, but now it seems a mile. There is nobody in the stands. There is no doctor on hand, and no emergency personnel. There are no cellphones. There is something called 911, but it has just been instituted in Nassau County, and people are still much more accustomed to calling the operator or the fire department in an emergency. They — all of them, the coaches and the players — are suddenly all alone, with no help available and Jay Kutner flat on the field and unable to move. They hear his voice, the fear in it. They have no idea what to do, and they make mistakes. Kavanaugh remains where he stood in the backfield, and he sees Coach Bruno grabbing his quarterback by the belt, as if the wind has been knocked out of him and he’s trying to force air back into his lungs. The Amityville players wonder why Jay’s helmet is off when he’s not moving and he’s complaining about his neck. The coaches clear the field, and the teams move away from the fallen player like two armies too exhausted to keep fighting. The Amityville Tide climb back into their yellow school buses and head home. The Holy Trinity Titans, both varsity and JV, gather on the threadbare grass in front of the locker room and stare into the distance at the small knot of desperate men bent over their friend on the playing field. It turns into kind of a vigil if only because they have to wait. Time passes, the sun sinks in the hazy sky. The ambulance finally arrives and drives onto the field, its red light quietly whirling. The father of one of Trinity players is a New York City cop; he watched the scrimmage from the sideline and now he joins Jay in the back of the ambulance. He sees Jay struggling to breathe and he doesn’t want him to ride alone, this teenaged boy with a broken neck

WHAT HAPPENS TO CADEN on Aug. 23 happens right in front of them all. They are so close, in the intimacy of the small stadium they call home; they are so far away, in their inability to change what they see and hear. Caden’s father, Jamie, is sitting in the little booth perched at the top of the stands, sending in plays; Caden’s mother, Arsella, is a few rows down, sitting where she always sits, next to Pastor Roxanne Jones. When Caden takes himself out of the game, she’s immediately worried. “ACL,” Roxanne says to her. But when her only son slumps over on the green grass, she turns around and motions her husband to go down to the field. Her gesture — her uncharacteristically urgent gesture — is what lets him know that Caden is in trouble. He rushes down the narrow rickety steps from the booth and then jumps onto the track and then to the sideline. But Arsella reaches Caden first. So does a doctor who was watching from the stands. The game between the Morgan Academy and the Southern Academy somehow continues, somehow persists, until the play-by-play announcer for Morgan sounds an alarm over the booming stadium loudspeakers: “Refs, stop the game — we have a medical emergency!”

The stadium falls into rapt silence interwoven with murmured prayers, and everybody who loves Caden watches as the doctor removes his shoes and prods the soles of his feet with scissors. When an ambulance takes him to the hospital in Selma, the game resumes with a sophomore named Patrick Johnson at quarterback. He doesn’t throw the ball very much but Morgan Academy plays inspiring football, the game won on the ground by a team that doesn’t know yet that Caden has been flown to Birmingham in a helicopter. His family follows in their car; his teammates return to their homes, and most of them are asleep when, in the early-morning hours, phones begin ringing and their parents begin taking the calls. Amanda Denmark gets a call. Her son, Caine McLaughlin, is a lineman at Morgan and one of Caden’s closest friends. She walks into his room and finds him fast asleep, as only a high school boy can be. She wonders if she should wake him but decides not to. Sleep is what he needs and what he’s going to need. He’s going to have the rest of his life to take in the news that his quarterback is brain-dead.

HIS NAME IS TIM TIMLIN. He’s a quarterback. He’s a junior and he has talent. He was the one waiting to step in during the scrimmage when the coach called Jay back for one more play. He figures that now he’ll need to replace Jay as the starter. But there’s another scrimmage, this one on the Saturday after Jay broke his neck. It’s between the Titans, and it’s being played to determine who will lead the team. Timlin has the worst game of his life. He throws three interceptions and the coaches turn to a senior who’s one of Jay’s closest friends. His name is Bobby DeLorenzo. He’s not a quarterback, at least in the way Jay was, and he didn’t expect to play quarterback when Jay was starting. He’s so nearsighted he has to wear his owlish eyeglasses even when he’s on the field. He doesn’t have the big arm and, at a shade under 5-10, he doesn’t have the stature. He’s just a utility player who can do a little of everything and fill in wherever he’s needed — “a Swiss Army knife kind of guy,” Timlin calls him. But he’s perfect for the wing-T, and something happens when he steps in. His teammates respond to him. They would do anything for him. He replaces Jay even as he knows that Jay can’t be replaced. And they win.

They win because they find purpose and they find purpose because they win, and after each game they visit Jay in Nassau Hospital. It is not easy for them. It is not easy for him. He broke the two vertebrae, the C-3 and the C-4, high up in his neck. His spine was not severed but his spinal cord swelled, and the swelling did irreversible damage. A tracheotomy saved him when the ambulance brought him in, a ventilator keeps him breathing now. He can barely speak and sometimes he answers questions by blinking his eyes. But those eyes, they’re still blue, and that smile, it’s still full of mischief. Back when he had a summer job as a crossing guard, his friends used to come by to see him in his uniform, and he would do silly dances for them out in the middle of the crosswalk. Now he tries to crack jokes with his tracheotomy. He does it for them, for his boys, and they in turn do something for him when they play Chaminade 25 days after his injury.

Holy Trinity has been in existence for less than 10 years, and it has never beaten Chaminade, the prestigious all-boys school located in the same Long Island town where Jay is hospitalized. They’re behind at halftime, and a priest who has just visited Jay in the hospital comes to the locker room with a message from him: “Win.” One of the captains on the team, Gregg Garner, stands up and says, “You hear that? Jay isn’t going through all that he’s going through just so we can lose to Chaminade!” He begins banging the steel lockers with his helmet and then everybody else does the same and they emerge from the racket and the uproar to defeat their despised rival in the second half. Later that night, they present Jay with the game ball in his hospital room, telling him that they couldn’t have done it without him and watching the tears shining in his blue blinking eyes.

Then they leave. For all anyone knows, the victory over Chaminade might hurt Jay as much as it helps him. He might not want a football, given what football has done to him, and when his teammates go home and he’s alone again in the hospital, his tears of sparkling joy might turn to tears of hopelessness and sorrow. But maybe he understands that he has done more for them than they can ever do for him, and that’s where he finds his comfort. Maybe he told them to win not for himself but for them, because he knew they needed to hear it. They are young, 16 and 17 years old, and their lives are in front of them. Most of his life is already behind him, but he changes them, in ways they won’t fully grasp for years. A football game sounds like such a paltry thing in comparison to the suffering he has to endure. But what else did they have to offer? He asked them for it, and they gave it to him, and nothing else is ever the same for them, especially Bobby DeLorenzo.

He is the quarterback of his high school football team, glasses and all. He is the first Holy Trinity quarterback to beat Chaminade, and he leads the Titans to a second-place finish in the Catholic high school league. He winds up dating the girl he will never cease calling the prettiest in the school and then winds up marrying her. He tells himself, always, that he did the impossible after his friend Jay was paralyzed, and so there’s no challenge he shies from. It is not until much later that he sees clearly that he had the life Jay should have had. He sees that Jay gave him his life, just the sheer opportunity of it. And with both pride and a sadness that still sneaks up on him, he realizes that if you want to know how Jay Kutner might have lived, you might want to look at how Bobby DeLorenzo is still living.

WHEN CADEN WAS 4 YEARS OLD, Jamie Tellier’s father died of cancer. Caden was very close with his grandfather, and his parents worried about how he would respond to the loss. They woke him in the morning after “Pops” died overnight, and when they told him the news they were shocked that he didn’t cry, that he appeared unfazed. “Pops has gone to heaven,” Jamie said. “Oh, I know,” Caden said. “He stopped on his way and told me.”

Now 12 years have passed, and it is Caden who is gone. His brain has died, and the body that has been left behind is being sustained by machines in his Birmingham hospital room. His mother and father know what they must do next, because he has told them. He just turned 16 in May, and so he also just got his driver’s license. He talked to his parents about his decision when he was checking the required boxes. He was very clear about what he wanted and what God was asking of him. In the event of his death, he wanted to be an organ donor, based on his conviction that somewhere out in the world was a person he was meant to help. Jamie and Arsella were struck by his confidence, by his certainty about an eventuality they could barely bring themselves to contemplate. Now they remember what he had told them as a little boy. He had always behaved as if he were just passing through, with one foot already in heaven. It was what gave him his confidence at 16. It was also what gave him his unearthly confidence at age 4, and it is what gives his parents confidence that Caden is already with Pops in heaven, with just his body in the hospital room.

His mother calls it his “earth suit.” And on Sunday, Aug. 25, she and her husband and daughter have to find the strength to let go of it. They have to abide by the wishes printed on Caden’s license. They have to allow the doctors to prepare his body for organ removal rather than survival. And they have to say goodbye to their beautiful boy. They are not alone in this. People begin arriving from Selma early in the morning and keep arriving all day. It is a pilgrimage, and as much as they might believe he is already gone, they want to see him, they want to touch him, they want to pray over him, they want to tell him they love him. But the room is closed to all but Jamie and Arsella, the family and Caden’s girlfriend and closest friends. So when the doctors come, the nurses come, and when at last Caden is being rolled on a gurney out the door of his room, there are hundreds of people waiting for him. They line one hallway of the hospital, two hallways, three hallways, and Caden rolls past all of them. They are silent, they are softly applauding, they are praying, they are sobbing, they are waving goodbye, until at last another set of doors opens and closes, and he is gone — gone to do good, for good.

BACK IN THE SUMMER , before the onset of football practice, Jay went with some of his friends to visit a classmate in the hospital. She was, in many ways, his counterpart — an accomplished gymnast, a captain of the cheerleaders, a leader of her class. She had suffered a spinal injury during a gymnastics camp. Jay visited her at the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation in New York City, where she was already demonstrating the resolve that sustains her to this very day. But Jay was shaken. On the drive home, he said to the friends jammed into an old Mercury Comet something they will not forget: “I don’t know if I could do it. I don’t know if I could live like that. I think I’d rather be dead.”

He has a friend, Tom Casey, at Trinity. Tom’s mother, Janet, is a nurse. She’s the supervising nurse at Nassau Hospital. She likes to stay late at the hospital and visit her son’s friend Jay Kutner. She likes talking to him, because they have something in common. They both have a secret. Jay’s is that he’s terrified of what’s to come. Janet’s is that she’s a Catholic woman who’s planning to leave her husband. Jay can’t go home. Janet doesn’t want to, so she stays with him. Maybe she tells him it’s OK to be afraid.

One day, she meets one of her student volunteers, Nancy Fischer. Nancy is a sophomore at Holy Trinity. Janet tells her to visit Jay. Nancy is 15, tall, and a little awkward. She knows who Jay Kutner is, of course — everybody does. But she doesn’t know him. She’s not friends with him. In truth, she’s embarrassed, because she doesn’t think she’s worthy of him — what can she do for Jay Kutner? And she’s also scared by the sight of him in his bed, helpless among the machines. But Janet is her boss, and she’s not giving Nancy a choice. She starts visiting him every week, sitting by his bedside. She talks about school, mostly — the things that happen throughout the day. He doesn’t say much. He can’t. So he just listens. She wishes she could say something profound instead of hearing herself prattle on about this and that. But he smiles when he sees her walk into the room, and one day, when he smiles, she realizes he’s withering away.

Jay doesn’t stay at Nassau Hospital, in Mineola. He is a chronic case, so he moves to Goldwater Memorial Hospital, on Roosevelt Island in New York City, in the middle of the East River. There was once a penitentiary on that island. The smallpox hospital and the almshouse and the asylum used to be on that island. And it is on that island, and in that hospital, that fear really takes hold. He still has visitors; his mother, Virginia, even with all the children at home, visits every day, and Bobby D and the boys drive 45 minutes to the city whenever they can. But whoever visits Jay at Goldwater Memorial Hospital will talk about Goldwater Memorial Hospital and have bad dreams about Goldwater Memorial Hospital for a long time — the men in the iron lungs, the brusque nurses, the coughing, the groaning, the hopelessness, the isolation, the sodality of lost causes. There are people who visit once and never again, and there is Sister Amelia who taught Jay at Trinity and now teaches in Manhattan. She tries to visit him every week, and once, when she is sitting next to him, she hears him struggling to speak. It is hard for him, but she can hear him well enough, and she’ll never forget what he says: “What should I think about God?”

“If you’re angry at him, you should tell him,” Sister Amelia says. “Have that conversation. Because if you speak to him honestly, that will be your prayer.”

It is hard to be a helpless hero. The people who have invested their hopes in Jay have little choice but to keep doing so. They want Jay to be brave, and he is brave. They want Jay to hold fast to his will to live, and he holds on for as long as he possibly can. But he is dying. He is susceptible to infections and fevers. He burns, there in his bed at Goldwater, and at the end of April, around seven months after he fell on the field at Holy Trinity, he is transferred to another hospital, this time Bellevue, on the East Side of Manhattan. Not long after, his friend Georgie Wich hears from his father, a New York City cop. Do you want to go see him, he asks. Dad, it’s late, George says. Do you want to go see him, his father asks again.

George and his father go to Bellevue in the middle of the night. He spends time with his friend, and on the next day, May 23, the Feast of the Ascension, Jay dies of a bladder infection. A few weeks later, the yearbook that honors his graduating class is published. There, among the black and white senior portraits, are Jay Kutner and Thomas Young, wearing the same loud plaid blazer. It belonged to Jay; he shared it with Tom when Tom didn’t have one. Now Jay is gone, and Tom is the only one who knows, who remembers, what Jay did for him.

THERE IS A WORSHIP SERVICE on Wednesday, three days after well-wishers crowded the hallways at the hospital. It’s at The Cathedral of Christ the King, the church downtown where the Telliers worship. Seven hundred people come, so many that the crowd overflows the chapel. Most are from Selma, but not all. The story of Caden Tellier’s short life and precipitous death has made the national news over the weekend, to the extent that Jamie Tellier, on Monday morning, opens his phone only to read the news once again that Caden is gone. People have traveled from all over Alabama to be part of the service, including a family from around Greensboro. The player from Southern Academy who made the fatal tackle just five nights ago has come to pray, along with his parents. The Telliers embrace them in the absolute conviction that Caden wants them to — not that he would want them to; that he wants them to, now, from his place in heaven.

Two nights before his injury, Caden told his youth group that he wanted to see a revival — a spiritual gathering of sorts — on his football team and at Morgan Academy. This night, at Christ the King, is the beginning of it. But what is a revival at a school that was chartered in 1965 in response to the Civil Rights Act, that was named after a senator who doubled as a grand wizard in the KKK, and that admitted its first Black student in 2008? What is a revival on a team that plays a sport predicated on pointed, intentional and occasionally lethal violence? There are problems in our schools and in our sports that sometimes feel nearly as old as original sin and nearly as resistant to change. The convulsions of grief that shake Selma in the wake of Caden’s death do not transform Selma; they allow people to pray for the power of pardon, to forgive and to be forgiven.

Grief might sometimes tell stories, grief might speak through the imagination, grief might find its way into our dreams as well as our prayers. But stories do something real if they help us survive. Imagination speaks the truth if it helps us stay alive. And dreams are gifts of mercy if they give us the strength to offer ourselves to others when we have lost everything. The Telliers have lost Caden. Morgan Academy has lost Caden. The people of Selma have lost Caden. They all tell stories about him — triumphant stories. He died for a reason, they say, he died for a cause, he died as part of a plan, he died for us. Some people believe those stories; some people don’t. But it’s because of those stories that the Telliers have the astonishing strength to accompany Caden’s body as he is rolled out of the hospital room. It’s because of those stories that Caden’s teammates call the boy from Greensboro who tackled Caden along the sideline and is still grieving himself. They take him out for dinner, and then take him out hunting, so that he knows they don’t blame him, they’re not mad at him, it was an accident, it was not intentional, it was a good clean hit, he was only doing his job, it was not his fault, it’s nobody’s fault, these things happen, and God is always good.

THERE ARE STORIES TOLD by grief and time about Jay, too. Fred Bruno is the coach who called Jay back for one more play, one more snap. It turns out to be his last season at Trinity. He resigns and begins coaching at a public high school in Suffolk County. His coaching colleagues say he made the move for better pay. But he never wins a championship, and the death of Jay Kutner always follows him around. When he quits coaching, he becomes a pastor at a Christian church in East Meadow, just a few miles from Holy Trinity.

Kevin Kavanaugh holds Coach Bruno accountable for Jay — the way he picked him up by the belt. He was right there, the running back waiting for Jay to hand him the ball. Jay never got there, and Kevin, a few years later, feels as if he’s still waiting. He’s 24 years old and his life has yet to begin. Then his life almost ends. He eats something he shouldn’t eat. He has no idea he’s allergic to it, but he finds out his susceptibility by going into anaphylaxis. His throat closes. He can’t breathe. He’s dying, and then suddenly he’s dead — his heart has stopped. A doctor is working on him, telling him, “Don’t go, don’t go, don’t go,” but he’s leaving, all the voices coming to him now from a great distance. And then he sees two faces. One belongs to an aunt who died when he was a little boy. The other belongs to Jay Kutner. They say, “Go back, you’re not ready yet,” and that’s when Kevin takes a breath and speaks to the doctor. “I’m not going anywhere,” he says.

Tommy Joyce is another of the Titans’ running backs. He blames himself for failing Jay. He visits Jay, but he can’t shake the fear he sees in Jay’s eyes when he sits with him in those hopeless hospital rooms. He wants to say something to take the fear away but doesn’t know what it could be. He spends his life searching for those words and he finds them when he gives his life to God. Tommy becomes the man he always wanted to be, a graduate of Annapolis, a decorated fighter pilot, a husband, a father, and a captain with an office in the Pentagon, where he sits on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. He is 45 years old. He’s thinking of Jay, because it has been 28 years to the day since Tommy saw Jay break his neck diving for a fumble. Then an explosion knocks him to the ground, and when he looks out his window, he sees an enormous billowing fireball. A plane has hit the Pentagon, and he begins moving immediately to get people out. That fear he saw in Jay’s face so long ago — he sees it again. This time he knows what to do, and he becomes one of the many heroes of 9/11, taking people out of the burning building, saving lives.

Jay Kutner died more than 51 years ago, on May 23, 1974. He was 18 years old. According to National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research (NCCSIR) statistics, in 1974, a total of 10 middle school and high school football players died of the traumatic injuries they incurred from playing. In 1975, 13. In 1976, 12. In 1977, seven. In 1978, nine. In 1979, three. In 1980, nine. In 1981, five. In 1982, seven. In 1983, four. In 1984, four. In 1985, four. In 1986, 11. In 1987, four. In 1988, seven. In 1989, four. In 1990, zero. In 1991, three. In 1992, two. In 1993, three. In 1994, zero. In 1995, four. In 1996, five. In 1997, six. In 1998, six. In 1999, four. In 2000, three. In 2001, eight. In 2002, three. In 2003, two. In 2004, four. In 2005, two. In 2006, one. In 2007, three. In 2008, seven. In 2009, two. In 2010, two. in 2011, three. In 2012, one. In 2013, eight. In 2014, five. In 2015, seven. In 2016, two. In 2017, two. In 2018, two. In 2019, four. In 2020, the pandemic year, zero. In 2021, four. In 2022, three. In 2023, two. In 2024, three, including Caden Tellier, who, before he died at age 16, chose to donate his organs.

I WAS JUST A BOY. And I was there.

I was there on Sept. 22, 1972, when Jay Kutner threw a 73-yard-touchdown pass against Syosset. I was a freshman at Holy Trinity, 14 years old. It was the first high school football game I ever attended. The Holy Trinity Titans wore the green-and-white of my favorite team, the New York Jets. They were losing when junior quarterback Jay Kutner stepped in. He wore No. 5. He was tall. He faded back in the pocket and threw the ball 50 yards downfield. The ball landed in the outstretched hands of a receiver named Barry Pannell who never broke stride. It was beyond beautiful — it was everything I ever wanted, in a spiral, in the arc of communication between quarterback and receiver. And it changed everything for me. I was a slow split end on a freshman team I barely made. But suddenly I wanted to do that. I wanted to be a quarterback. I wanted to be like Jay Kutner.

I was there a year later, on Tuesday, Sept. 11. I was a JV quarterback. Jay in his kindness, told me during training camp that I threw “a nice ball.” We scrimmaged against Amityville alongside the varsity, on the same field. Then the coaches ushered us off and herded us back to the locker room. Coaches and players were running around, with a terrible harried look in their eyes, as if dogs had set upon them. We gathered in the bristly grass out in front of the locker room and waited in the dust, stared out in the distance, and tried to understand what it meant, what we were hearing, that Jay Kutner was badly hurt. It was a long time ago. But I remember the futility and the panic and the wait. I remember the ambulance and fire truck drove right onto the field, so late that they seemed to bring darkness with them.

I was there on the day set aside to mourn his death. It was late spring, the school year almost over. There was a memorial Mass in the big chapel across from the entrance to the locker room. Jay’s teammates assisted, as altar boys. Kids trying to look brave, kids trying to look solemn, little knots of kids everywhere, sobbing, the way rainstorms break out, simultaneously across a hodgepodge of clouds. I wandered around and came upon two girls from my class, crying so hard they were shaking, they were embracing each other, they were one broken person. I had never seen anything like it, and I wondered: What must it have been like to be loved like that? What must it have been like to be Jay Kutner? And what might Jay Kutner have become?

JAMIE TELLIER HAS A DECISION TO MAKE. He has already made the decision to speak at Caden’s funeral, because he wanted to testify to Caden’s love of the Lord. That was his decision as a father. But now he has another kind of decision to make: a decision of a father who is also a coach. He has to decide whether to return to football.

It is entirely up to him. Certainly no one would blame him if he simply said, I can’t. The Morgan Academy Senators have a new head coach this year, Jacob Webb, and he has already been told by the school’s headmaster that this season is not about wins and losses but rather about making sure his players take care of each other. Coach Webb has told Jamie he should do what he feels is right for him and his family. Everybody has told Jamie he should do what is right for him and his family. But what is right for him and his family? And he asks himself, what is right for Caden?

He saw it, from the booth — he saw the tackle, and he saw Caden take himself out and then slump down. And, of course, he still sees it, every second; he can’t stop seeing it, eyes open or closed. He agrees that it was a good tackle, a clean play; he calls his son’s injury “the accident.” The question he has to answer is whether he can see it again, any of it, another tackle, another hit, another boy slow to get up, more football. He has time; the game scheduled the week after Caden’s death has been canceled and the following week is a bye. He wouldn’t be able even to consider walking on the field otherwise. But can he consider it now? The game on Sept. 13 is against Monroe Academy. Three weeks have passed since the tackle, the accident, the loss, the walk down through the hospital halls. But Jamie Tellier doesn’t make his decision until two hours before game time.

THEY ARE ALL SURVIVORS. There were 11 of them, to start with. But Jay played football. Rosemary Kutner was born with Down syndrome and died in an institution at age 4. Matthew was born with a congenital heart condition and into a childhood of multiple surgeries; he dreamed of playing hockey, and when he was 19 his doctor approved him to do so. His heart gave out and he collapsed in his brother Kenny’s arms playing in a street hockey league; he was pronounced dead at the hospital. Stephen lived to a saintly adulthood, but when he died of cancer in 2018, he was the fourth child Virginia Kutner buried before her own death two years later. There are seven of them now. And yet as they all meet with me around a conference table in a law office in Garden City, New York, they project neither fragility nor diminished numbers — anything but.

There are three brothers, Harry and Chris and Kenny, all of them lawyers; there are two sisters, Bernie and Marybeth; there are a brother and a sister, Raymond and Ann Marie, attending on Zoom, along with Harry’s son, John Joseph Kutner II; and there is Harry’s wife, Barbara, who keeps her husband in line and hence everyone else. They are in their 50s and 60s and 70s. Their hair is mostly gray and white, but the men all wear sharp suits, the women have all dressed for the occasion, and, en masse, the Kutners are blessed with the electricity of big sprawling families, the eternal youth of their eternal jostling. With their quips and their complaints and comebacks, they pride themselves on being a tough crowd, and even with all of their losses, they do not seem like a tragic family but, rather, a family that has endured tragedy. And yet there is something that they’ve never done, never had the time to do nor the inclination: They’ve never sat in one place, all together, and talked about Jay.

They’re doing it now, and so they’re crying, one at a time, two at a time, sometimes as they’re speaking and sometimes after they’ve spoken, reflected on some moment, told some story. The bad news of Jay’s injury; the horrible news of how very bad it was; the hope that dwindled away; the individual isolation of the big booming household; the loneliness caused by Virginia’s faithful vigil at her son’s bedside; the pitiless education they received from the sight and sound of the iron lungs on Roosevelt Island; their unspoken prayers, at Bellevue, for the mercy of an ending. They talk for hours, and what they come to at last is not simply a reckoning with grief, but also with the man who bore up under it. “Tell me about your father,” I say, remembering what one of Jay’s friends told me about Judge Harry Kutner and the slap. “Aw Jesus, now you’ve done it,” his namesake Harry Jr. says, drumming his fingers and rolling his eyes. They each have different versions of the old man. But they agree that he softened at the end of his life, learning how to lend an ear, becoming a father the kids could bring their troubles to because he had troubles of his own. The war hero, the B-29 pilot, the NYC cop who learned the law at night school, the man of unyielding rectitude who turned out to be born for the bench — he couldn’t forgive himself about Jay. He couldn’t forgive himself for not visiting Jay in the hospital more often. He had gone, sure, but not enough, never enough. He died at 94, still regretting. The kids would tell him don’t be silly, he had 10 mouths to feed and a wife who visited her son every single day, no matter what. But the Judge would wave them off. A hero must follow his own example.

“Did your father have any heroes of his own?” I ask.

“Jay was my father’s hero,” Harry says, and for once all of them, all those squabbling, surviving Kutners, don’t have to add anything. They just nod in solemn agreement. Yes.

HIS NAME IS PATRICK JOHNSON. He is a fledgling quarterback because he’s a fledgling football player. He’s “double-sided” about football, he acknowledges — playing the game mainly because his friends play. He’s a sophomore at Morgan, and he’s satisfied to be Caden Tellier’s backup. He goes to practice, but he’s happy to be on the sideline during the games, and he pushes neither Caden nor himself. It is, in fact, Caden who pushes him, Caden who makes sure that Patrick gets his reps, Caden who tells Patrick of his potential, Caden who instructs Patrick to go out there and don’t try to be anyone but himself. On Aug. 23, 2024, Patrick is on the sideline when Caden appears to break loose on a running play before he’s tripped up and spills forward. He watches Caden take himself out; he hears Caden complain that he doesn’t feel well. He wonders if Caden has a concussion and can’t help but wonder how many games he might sit out, how many games Patrick will have to …

Three days later, Patrick goes on Facebook and writes a long tribute to the late Caden Tellier. He writes about all of it — his uncertainty about his role, the game that resumed after Caden went to the hospital, the tough victory Morgan Academy dedicated to its quarterback, the celebration afterward, the news that Caden had a brain bleed, the tears that his parents shed telling him that next morning that Caden was brain-dead, Patrick’s decision to do what he feared most and stand in the hallway of the hospital and watch Caden being wheeled away. It’s a beautiful post because of its honesty, and also because, implicit in those words is the story Patrick is telling not just about Caden but about himself. He’s 15 years old, and he’s the quarterback now. He wants to honor Caden’s legacy, but the only way he can do that is to do what Caden will never have the chance to — grow up, be himself, live a life, be a leader, become a man. “Why him, why not me, why did he deserve it of anyone in the world,” he asks. Then, in the end, he addresses his friend: “God sent us an angel for 16 years that we didn’t deserve. Satan tried to get this to tear our school apart but all it has done is make us stronger. No matter what, I will always consider myself QB2 because you will always be my Quarterback. I love you #17 and I will never forget the impact you had on my life.”

It’s a post that, despite the youth of its author, raises powerful questions about character and God and fate. What it never does — what none of the many tributes to Caden ever do — is raise questions about football.

WE HAVE MADE a kind of uneasy peace with the pain. It is, of course, a defining and inescapable feature of the game. We cannot watch our favorite teams play without also watching some of our favorite players being carried off the field. We cannot avoid becoming witnesses to injury and sometimes agony. Why do we keep watching? Because to us, the game is worth it. Because pain makes football feel authentic. If players put themselves at physical risk to play it, we will put ourselves at moral risk to watch it. And that is the pact that has made football America’s national sport.

But we have not made peace with another aspect of football that has been part of the game since its inception. In the first decade of the 20th century, when it was a fledgling sport of rising popularity, it was also a sport in which people died. It had a fan in President Theodore Roosevelt in those days. He thought its brutality could preserve American manliness and help his country win wars. “I believe in rough games and in rough, manly sports,” he said in a 1903 speech. “I do not feel any particular sympathy for the person who gets battered about a good deal so long as it is not fatal.” But eight young men were killed playing football in 1904 and 18 the year after that. In 1909, 26 players perished.

Newspaper editorials and university presidents called for the game’s abolition. Roosevelt helped institute the modern system of down and distance and pushed for the legalization of the forward pass so that fewer players would be stampeded. Fatality became the line that football approached but hoped not to cross, the line that a sport of breathtaking “roughness” came to live by.

Players have died playing lacrosse. Players have died playing hockey. Boxers not only die, they are literally beaten to death. But no other team sport has the record of on-field mortality that football does. According to statistics compiled by the NCCSIR, nearly 2,000 football players have died while playing since 1931, the causes of death divided evenly between “traumatic injury” and “exertional” events such as heat stroke and cardiac arrest. The incidence of fatal injuries peaked in the years when football displaced baseball as America’s national sport and the numbers of people playing it surged: between 1966 and 1986, 306 football players died of “traumatic injury.” And there is further heartbreak implicit in the mute testimony of the statistics. Since 1966, 370 players in high school and middle school have died of “traumatic injury” playing football. One of the three players who died in 2024 was a 13-year-old who suffered a brain injury making a tackle during practice. There are a number of theories that attempt to explain why immaturity and mortality are linked. The brain keeps developing through adolescence, making it more vulnerable than a mature brain to the kind of trauma football inflicts. But even without explanation the numbers are terribly clear: Most of the players who die playing football are young men and boys.

Jay Kutner and Caden Tellier were in many ways the same kind of boy — what used to be called “All-American.” They were popular, handsome, talented, kind-hearted, leaders less by virtue of the position they each played than by the character they each developed. They played in different decades, in different parts of the country. But how they lived is intertwined with how they’re remembered, and how they’re remembered is intertwined with the game they played. People admired them. People followed them. People loved them, and football was and still is central to that. There was something beautiful about how they lived, because football can be beautiful; there was something unbearable about how their lives ended, because football can be unbearable. Teddy Roosevelt was right: Football can make men out of boys. But Jay and Caden were boys who never had the chance to become men.

HE CRIES. He’s just a boy, and he thinks he shouldn’t. But his aunts and uncles are crying, so he figures he can cry without shame. He is standing with them on a field being dedicated to the memory of their brother, an uncle he never met. They talk about him sometimes — Uncle Jay. It’s 1994; he died 20 years ago from a broken neck he suffered in this very place, on this very football field. But there’s his name, spelled out on a big sign on the back of the bleachers, visible from the main road. You can’t drive past Holy Trinity High School without seeing it: John Kutner Memorial Field. People called him Jay. People call the boy John or JJ, but his name is the same. He is named after his uncle. He is John Joseph Kutner II.

He does not go to Holy Trinity when he’s old enough for high school. He goes to Garden City High. But the name follows him around, because people see it whenever they drive on Newbridge Road in Hicksville. “Is that you?” they ask, oblivious to its meaning. He shakes his head. “No, that’s my uncle. He died.” But in a way, he’s a walking memorial — he plays baseball and basketball and lacrosse, and he excels in all of them. Once he finds out the number his uncle wore, he wears No. 5.

There is, however, one sport JJ Kutner wishes he could play, but can’t. He can’t play football. His lacrosse coach wants him to play football, wants to toughen him up. JJ wants to play football, wants to prove he’s tough enough. But he’s not allowed to. His father, Harry, won’t let him. Harry has inherited some of Judge Kutner’s vehemence, and so he doesn’t have to say it more than once — “You’re not playing football. There’s no discussion.” The coaches might want JJ to play football, but they know better than to try appealing Harry’s edict. So does JJ. He’s a Kutner, part of a big and endlessly competitive family. He has 31 cousins. Only one of them braves the family prohibition against playing football.

JJ plays college lacrosse, enduring a series of knee injuries to become more of a star in his sport than even his Uncle Jay was in his. His name, over time, becomes less of a burden to him, and more of a point not only of pride but of meaning. He might not have known the first John Joseph Kutner, but he knew his Uncle Matthew, and one of his earliest memories is attending Uncle Matthew’s funeral after he suffered a heart attack playing street hockey. He was 19, Uncle Matthew. JJ is in his 40s now, a man with a wife and child, and therefore a decision he has to make. I meet him in the fall, at a hotel where children are running around on the grass and his family is enjoying the soft waning sunlight. He knows why his dad forbade him to play the sport he wanted to play most of all — it’s … dangerous. People call what happened to his uncle an accident because it was unintentional. But people get into accidents by driving too fast. They get into accidents driving drunk. Jay Kutner didn’t do any of that. He was innocent. He was just playing a game. And yet the game …

JJ still feels that he missed out. He missed out on meeting Uncle Jay. He missed out growing up with Uncle Matthew. But he missed out on football too, and so neither he nor his wife is definitive on the subject. Their little boy is running around on the green grass, with long blond hair, beautiful and wild. Football or no football? JJ can’t imagine making the choice for him the way his father did. He suspects he’ll let his son make a choice for himself. The little boy drifts back to the table, and this time John Joseph Kutner II grabs him and makes the introduction.

“Say hello,” his father tells him.

“Hello,” the boy says.

“Hello,” I say to John Joseph Kutner III.

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I CRASH THE REUNION. Holy Trinity High School, Hicksville, New York, Class of 1974. They’re easy enough to spot at a big chain sports bar on Route 110, the white hair, the pink faces, the vestigial beer-drinking postures of Catholic school magically preserved. And they’re all there, Bobby DeLorenzo, Kevin Kavanaugh, Brian Clancy, Georgie Wich, some of the Tommys. They’re all welcoming to the interloper in their midst because they have a story to tell about two people who are not there and whose absence has always fused this particular graduating class together. It still sounds unbelievable in the telling — two of their classmates suffered spinal injuries within a few weeks of the onset of their senior year. One, the gymnast, managed to thrive; she has a husband, two children, a career, and a talent for art. The other, the quarterback, wasn’t even supposed to be in there; it was the end of the scrimmage, they were done, it was the last play, the last snap, the coach called him in for one more exchange with the center and it proved fatal.

I spot the center right away. The football team grieved for Jay Kutner, but it also celebrated itself for what it accomplished that year — the seven games it won against all odds, including the landmark victory against Chaminade — and it is still celebrating itself at the reunion. The players had all been through something and come out the other side, and the chemistry between them endures 50 years after the fact. But one of them operates on the periphery, and wears a tentative, sometimes pained expression. Jay’s youngest sister, Marybeth Kutner Marchand, has also come to the reunion to find out more about what happened to her brother on Sept. 11, and when she introduces herself to him, he shakes her hand and responds immediately: “I’m Mark Pospisil. I snapped the ball.”

For years, people thought it was Richie Callahan. Even most of his teammates thought that he was playing center when Jay Kutner fumbled; they didn’t ask him about it because they thought he wouldn’t want to talk about it. And Richie did feel bad about it, he did feel guilty about it, just not for the reasons they thought. He didn’t snap the ball. He wasn’t playing center when the ball came loose. He had taken himself out, believing the scrimmage was over. He went for water. He watched. There was a fumble. He has never stopped thinking he should have gone back in when he saw Jay go back in; he has never stopped thinking that he let his friend down.

Mark Pospisil wasn’t even a center. He was a guard. The coaches put him in to try him out. He was just doing what he was supposed to be doing, the counterintuitive snap one of the coaches favored. He was blocking when Jay fumbled. He was playing line, enveloped in the scrum, the tussle. The fumble happened behind him. He didn’t see. He heard about it later, when his teammates started talking about it — and then he got scared. He heard about it in school and then, a few weeks later, the coaches called him into their office. The office was a scary place, a big plate-glass window between the office and the locker room, which allowed the coaches to see out and the players to see in. They asked him questions. They were concerned about liability. What did he remember, did Jay Kutner have his helmet on or off when Mark left the field and headed to the locker room? Harry Kutner Sr. was suing the school, suing the Catholic diocese for not having a doctor on hand and leaving his son to the ministrations of the coaching staff, a suit later settled out of court. But the questions stuck with Mark. He thought of them as the decades went by, asking himself about his level of responsibility. He didn’t play center again at Holy Trinity. But he played center for life.

Richie and Mark. They’re in their late 60s now. Jay Kutner fumbled the snap and didn’t make it past 18. They both spent 50 years wondering if it was their fault, the death of their quarterback.

But there’s something they need to know.

It’s something people say, when players die of injuries they sustain playing football.

It’s a violent sport, and so, by definition, they die violently. Someone hits them, someone delivers the fatal blow. The terrible consequence is not intended, but the violence is, an intrinsic part of the game.

And yet what can the death be called but an accident? It sometimes even comes by accident, as the result of a mistake, a freak happenstance — a loose ball, a player laying himself out for a first down.

And so, what Richie and Mark need to know is what the Telliers said and what the players from Morgan Academy said to give comfort to the boy who took Caden down by a shoestring.

It wasn’t their fault, it’s not their fault, it was nobody’s fault.

It was football.

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JAMIE TELLIER FINALLY makes his decision on game day, three weeks after Caden’s fatal injury. He will not go back to the booth perched on top of the stands. He will not return to the place where he watched his son’s last run, both too close and too far away. He instead goes down to the field and does his coaching from the sideline. He will be as close to his players as possible. If one of them gets hurt, Jamie is going to be present, right there, in the fray.

Now two months have passed, and it’s the last game of the regular season, first day of November 2024. Jamie is on the sideline, with a headset framing his hair and his beard touched silver, and Caden … well, Caden is everywhere. His No. 17 is on Jamie’s shirt. The No. 17 adorns the T-shirts the entire Morgan team wears for warmups and all of their helmets. It’s on a circle on the 17-yard line of the field and on the game clock — 17 seconds left — until kickoff. Students are wearing buttons emblazoned with photos of his face, and they can be heard, in the stands, espousing their determination to “Live like Caden.” Listen closely: Live like Caden. He was just a boy. But he wanted — asked for — two things before he died: to have his jersey retired and to start a culture of religious revival at Morgan Academy. He has accomplished — though not lived to see — both.

It has become part of his story, the belief that Caden died young but did not die until he did exactly what God put him on Earth to do. The story that his life was short but remarkably and even enviably complete. And yet there is another story being told when Morgan takes the field against Lowndes Academy, and it also has the power to last. Lowndes is bigger, stronger and faster than Morgan, and Patrick Johnson, the sophomore starting quarterback, struggles along with the rest of his team. On the sideline, he seeks the counsel of his quarterbacks coach, Jamie Tellier, who puts his arm around his shoulder and talks to him with a solicitude that is unmistakable even from the stands. He has lost his son, but he is sure that his son would have wanted him to keep coaching Patrick and to keep coaching at Morgan until Patrick is no longer there. And so that’s what he’ll do. He’ll take care of him. They’ll take care of each other. They talk for a while, the coach and his quarterback, and it is such a human moment, such a loving and protective moment, that it almost comes as a surprise when the whistle blows and Jamie sends Patrick back onto the field.

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I SAW THE SIGNS FOR YEARS, every time I drove by my old school and passed John Kutner Memorial Field. I thought of Jay, with his New Frontier smile, and wondered who else remembered him. I decided to ask. I sought them out, his teammates and classmates. I asked them to go back in time, back 50 years, and in response they made me wish that I could go with them — wish that I had known Jay better.

I never saw him again after he broke his neck. I never visited him in the hospital. I was a scrub and didn’t think I had the rank to pay him a visit. What I remembered most, after the panic and desperation of his injury, was what I witnessed a few days after he died. The memorial. Those two girls in my class embracing each other, shaking and sobbing. Jay Kutner was gone; he had suffered, died and was buried. I still wanted to be him.

I decide to call one of those girls, Joanne Cappuccio Lopilato. I haven’t talked to her in decades; we might as well be strangers. But when I ask her if she remembers the day of the memorial Mass, she answers instantly.

“I remember,” she says. “And I remember the day he was hurt. I was waiting for him, back at the school. I was waiting for him to get out of practice. Oh, I had such a crush on him. Everybody did. He was the Big Man on Campus. But we used to talk. He was so kind. And do you know what? He still is. He’ll never age. He’ll always be that happy, smiling face. He’ll never change … to us.”

It’s when I begin talking about Jay — about the permanence of Jay — that I hear the news about Caden Tellier, down in Alabama.

I hear that he’s in heaven, I hear that he’s in God’s hands. I picture them on the same field. I see them linked. I even imagine that some people who read this story will believe that Jay Kutner and Caden Tellier are friends now, protected by a spiral of angels. And I know people for whom that will be enough, will be everything.

I don’t know any of that. I can’t say I know. But there is something I can say. I went back into the past for a glimpse of the future. I talked to people about something that happened 50 years ago to be certain about what could happen 50 years from now.

Jay Kutner died in 1974. Caden Tellier died in 2024. A year later, just before football season began, some 200 players in Dallas County, Alabama — from every school with a football team — gathered for a dinner hosted by the Caden Tellier Foundation. They broke bread together and listened to pastors pray for their protection. Jamie saw the night as another fulfillment of Caden’s dream.

Amen.

Nobody knows what’s going to happen in the 2025 football season. No one can say if our prayers for protection will be answered. But Jay Kutner’s family and friends can tell the Telliers what happens 50 years from now.

They can offer this assurance, this comfort: that Caden, like Jay, will be remembered.

That even 100 years apart, the boys who suffered the same fate will share the same fate.

The fate of the unforgotten.