Wisconsin, 1956
Stu felt his mother’s hand clutching tightly around his as they watched his brother Gary with the team huddled round him as they talked through the play.
Gary had once been his little baby brother. Stu still had that feeling of protectiveness towards him, but the star quarterback was easily a head taller than his older brother now.
Stu followed his mom’s gaze to the scoreboard, though he knew full well what it showed: the game was tied with less than a minute left to go.
Stu and his parents weren’t the only ones watching keenly, he knew. Scouts from several major colleges were here for the state final. They’d been hovering on the sidelines all season, but it was impossible to shake the idea that what happened right now in this final play might tilt their decision one way or the other.
Families like theirs didn’t have sons who went to college without the right combination of talent and luck. For Stu, his mathematical skills had opened doors that had remained closed to most of his high school classmates. For Gary, it was always going to be football.
The team dispersed from their huddle and took up their positions. The whistle blew; the clock started counting down again.
Stu watched as the seconds ticked down and nothing happened. Then, Gary rose to his feet and dropped it.
He was going for a field goal. It was utterly, completely insane. It was also one of the very few ways to break the tie and avoid overtime. The sort of risk taking that would most likely impress some scouts and horrify others. But absolutely Gary all over.
The ball bounced, and everyone in the stadium held their breath, whichever team they were supporting. Everyone had realised what he was trying, and that included the defense, who all rushed to try and get the ball.
They were just fractionally too slow, though, and Gary’s foot rose to make contact with the ball as it headed back upwards.
It headed up, rapidly going higher than the defense’s wild attempts to jump up and catch it could ever hope to reach.
Stu felt as though time slowed down around him as he watched, the trajectory of the ball perfectly clear in his mind, like the tracks of the stars on a long exposure photograph.
And, with that same crystal clarity, Stu saw that it was going to miss. Not by much. Gary was damn good, after all.
Still picturing the trajectory in his mind, projecting it forward, Stu imagined what it would take for the wind to push the ball back on course and send it sailing through the goalposts, the exact force it would have to impart and how fast the air would have to be moving to achieve that.
No chance of that; the weather had been perfectly calm all week.
But then, at the crucial moment, a sudden gust blew right across the stadium, almost knocking Stu and everyone around him back into their seats. Later, excitable reports that used phrases like “Milwaukee Miracle” would include the wind speed recorded at a nearby weather station, and it would match Stu’s calculation almost exactly.
As the ball passed between the goalposts, the crowd erupted all around Stu, his parents included. But he remained sitting, motionless, completely stunned, his mind unable to take in anything going on around him as a single thought echoing around over and over:
Did I do that?