“It feels like a fairy tale,” a friend said to me, mere seconds after the Lewiston High School boys’ soccer team clinched Maine’s Class A North championship title and secured a spot in Saturday’s state championship final. Indeed, the 1-0 win, with the lone goal coming from a brilliantly timed cross that Caden Boone got an aggressive head on, did not just feel like one more step in the city’s healing journey. It felt like a celebration.
Lewiston, of course, is still reeling from the shooting spree that took 18 lives and held the tightknit community frozen in terrifying time while the hunt for the gunman took place. One week after that horrible, dark night, a night in which people out for a drink or to bowl a few frames found themselves the subject of America’s 24/7 cable news cycle, a Lewiston High School football game started the slow process of recovery, whatever recovery means after a line is drawn in a city’s history, a line that marks things that happened before the shootings and those that came after.
Every moment of that football game, the storied “battle of the bridge” against cross-river rival Edward Little, was designed to rebuild and restore, with athletic director Jason Fuller knowing full well that for both the players on the field and the people in the bleachers, it was to be more than just a game between two adversaries. The pregame rituals went beyond acknowledging the seniors on the team and their families before the last regular season game: the reading of the 18 names of those who were not there; the tributes to the first responders and healthcare workers; and the dulcet tones of the one and only James Taylor, he who has provided the soundtrack for so much in our lives, standing in the middle of a high school football field, guitar in hand, offering a gentle, sweet, comforting version of the national anthem, one in which Lewiston could take heart in knowing that it was, indeed, the home of the brave.
A few days later, the boys’ soccer team, the team at the center of my book One Goal, which chronicled Lewiston’s journey to their first state championship title in 2015 with a roster that represented the sharp demographic shift that thousands of Somali refugees had brought to the overwhelmingly Quebecois city, took to the pitch, downing Edward Little (and yes, it was a tough week on the field for the Red Eddies) to secure a spot in the regional final. This past Tuesday night, facing a worthy foe in Camden Hills, Lewiston persevered yet again, and the burst of joy in this city that has known utterly gut-wrenching pain for the last few weeks, was unmistakable.
It is, indeed, a bit of a fairy tale, because fairy tales are not just about living happily ever after, the beauty transforming the beast, or a huntsman arriving to save the day. Fairy tales are also dark, with horrific details - the original versions of Charles Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood” and Hans Christian Andersen’s “Little Mermaid” come to mind — that offer us warnings about the world we live in, and the terrible people we may have to combat. These cautionary tales warn us that we do not always know what others are up to, that strangers can bring danger, and that evil is real, regardless of how good we try to be.
And yes, these dark parts of the stories can be for children, because the idea that children should be protected death and pain and grief is very much a modern notion — sheltering children from the knowledge that terrible things can happen to good people, according to these stories, only make them all the more vulnerable.
But then, again, fairy tales remind us that amidst the dark, there is the good, the happily ever after, the saving of the day. Sport, too, often feels like that. Much as we try, we cannot will our favorite teams to win, creating the ending that feels most perfect within our realm of fandom and support. But sometimes, it happens, as it did on a cold clear Tuesday night in Lewiston, Maine, a scrappy city with a long tradition of hockey championships that has now made room for soccer.
So, as the national media recedes, leaving Lewiston — a part of Maine that has little to do with rocky coasts or blueberry pie — to continue its path of healing on its own, the boys’ soccer team is headed to a state championship game. Win or lose, that’s a pretty good happily-ever-after in the midst of a dark and dreadful tale.
But not only do I believe in fairy tales, I believe in destiny. So, I’m betting on them to win.
Amy Bass is professor of sport studies and chair of the division of social science and communication at Manhattanville College. Bass is the author of ONE GOAL: A COACH, A TEAM, AND THE GAME THAT BROUGHT A DIVDED TOWN TOGETHER, among other titles. In 2012, she won an Emmy for her work with NBC Olympic Sports on the London Olympic Games.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.
