Third and Long

The first time I played any kind of organized football was out on the street in front of my childhood home. We lived on a dead end street, so most of our games went on uninterrupted for hours at a time. The real cool guys in our neighborhood would call "all-time quarterback" which meant not only that they could create all manner of zany routes for us receivers to run, but also they could be sure that they would never have to play defense and have to cover anyone running all manner of zany routes. "You run down to the station wagon, button hook, and wait. You go past the streetlight and cut in to the crack over there in the sidewalk. You stay in and block." That was usually my job. There would be one guy on the other team who was the designated rusher, but you had to wait five seconds before you could rush the quarterback. I have heard "bananas" used for counting seconds - but we were a "Mississippis" league. After the rusher counted five Mississippis, I would hold my forearms up to ward off the oncoming defender, and every so often if I let them slip by, I would find myself standing wide open for a short dump-off pass. Then I would run, as fast as I could, until somebody from the other team would shove me from the side - "two hand touch". Two hand touch had some variants: two hand touch below the waist, two hand touch anywhere, and (if we were really feeling dangerous) one hand anywhere. Then we'd line up and do it again.
Sometimes we would play on the lawn of my friend's house. We didn't play at our house because our front lawn had a sidewalk running through the middle of it, and our back yard was a minefield of dog poop. On grass we played tackle. When we played tackle, our rules changed a little. Sometimes we played "immediate rush," and we didn't play "all pass." We had some running plays. That was when they called my number. I wasn't fast, but I was low to the ground and hard to take down. My friend's older brother gave me the nickname "Tank." I liked that. I liked the contact. Being fast wasn't the most important thing.
I played more football with helmets and pads later in my youth. I liked that fine, but it never quite compared to playing on the dead end.