Sixteen-year-old Anna Hiser has been planning her costume for this month’s Otakon since last October. It’s only her second time attending the annual Japanese anime (or animation) conference, but the rising senior at Notre Dame Preparatory School has already become fully immersed in the Otaku culture.

Anna fell in love with manga (Japanese comics) five years ago, when her neighbor loaned her one of his books. Last year, she attended her first conference and was immediately hooked. She felt, for the first time, like she was surrounded by thousands of people who simply got her.

“The very idea of Otakon is that there is no judgment at all,” Anna explains. “You can show up in the most crazy, bizarre outfit and you would get a round of applause. It’s just great energy, and I have never met one unpleasant or unfriendly person there. The craziness just comes out of the walls!”

Costumes, or “cosplay,” are a major part of the conference. The main goal is to be able to enter into the character’s world and actually become that character for a weekend. Fellow conference goers take pictures, ask for autographs, and even call the attendee by the character’s proper name. This year, Anna has decided to dress as “Hungary” from the manga Hetalia Axis Powers. Her costume will consist of a white apron, a bow tie, an olive green dress, and a white kerchief fashioned into a hat.

Since much of her costume is homemade, Anna relies on her mother, architect Helen Hiser, for trips to fabric and craft stores. This resulted in an inevitable crash course in anime/manga for Helen. And while some parents might be freaked out by the outrageous and elaborate nature of the costumes, Helen is impressed by her daughter and her Otakon friends.

“Although there are a few [costumes] that aren’t especially appropriate, the vast majority are amazing,” she says. “They’re very creative; obviously, the wearers put a great deal of thought and work into them.”

Anna’s father, Fred, also an architect, echoes his wife’s sentiments: “The first time I saw Anna in her Otakon costume, I was very excited for her because I know that it is something that brings her great joy, and that she is having a lot of fun.”

Lisa and Michael Martin have also kept their hearts and minds open when it comes to their son Luke’s passion for all things anime. In fact, they took him to his first Otakon convention seven years ago, when he was just 10. When they were kids, they say, they were more into competitive sports and less into comic books and Star-Trek-convention-type stuff (which they see as the Otakon of their time). However, they have embraced the Otaku culture, for Luke’s sake.

“The first year was a little scary because I have never seen anything else like it—ever,” Lisa recalls. “My husband at first was like, ‘I don’t know.’ It was definitely a whole new world for us. But this will be his seventh year going, and it is nothing like you would expect. It is so much more about people expressing their creativity and artistic side.”

What’s more, the Martins are convinced that this is no mere phase for Luke, who will be a senior next year at Loyola Blakefield. He’s working hard on turning his passion into a career. This summer, he is taking a three-credit course at MICA in animation and hopes to build a future in the art and design world.

“It is one of the top things I look forward to out of the year,” Luke enthuses of Otakon. “It is three days of absolute paradise. I know of 20 or 30 other [kids] that would say the exact same thing.”

Anyone who has been around the Inner Harbor on the last weekend in July has already experienced the Otakon conference in some way. Numerous teens roam the streets, dressed up as unrecognizable (and sometimes scary) animated characters—as throngs of people photograph them. It is not uncommon to see swords, tails, 10-inch platform shoes, striped tights, and even stilts.

Baltimore hosts one of the largest Japanese anime/manga conventions in the country. And while the Otakon community is still small enough to remain shrouded in mystery, it’s large enough to attract 26,000 people every year and generate $15.3 million for Baltimore City businesses. (And according to Otakon officials, it’s not just kids who attend; the conference attracts enthusiasts ranging in age from 10 to 65 years old.)

Last year alone, 4,575 hotel rooms were booked for the Otakon weekend. All three days are jam-packed with concerts, karaoke, art galleries, video game rooms, panels with guest speakers on Japanese culture, and live action role playing (LARP) activities.

Luke’s friend Nick Anstett, also an incoming senior at Loyola Blakefield, attended his first Otakon convention last year. He dressed, somewhat conventionally, as Peter Parker from the Spiderman comic. But this year, he’s really getting into the spirit of things, dressing up as Nyan Cat, a Japanese Internet sensation with a pink coat and a rainbow tail.

“You are more a part of the community when you dress up,” he explains. “It is so neat to be a part of the experience.”

Nick’s father, Frank Anstett, takes a little credit for his son’s involvement in the anime community.

“I am maybe guilty of getting Nick started in it with my interest in ’50s and ’60s sci-fi movies,” he admits. “The Trekkie stuff was always centered around one common theme—but this brings out a lot of different expressions and story lines, which definitely fuels creative expression. I live vicariously through Nick and look forward to pictures of what he saw, what he did, and the panel discussions he attended.”

Counselors who focus on adolescent development emphasize that Otakon—and other conferences of its ilk—are a completely normal part of growing up.

“High school is hard,” says Dr. Arachchige Muthukuda, who specializes in children and adolescence at Sheppard Pratt. “The transition is difficult. College is in their head, the pressure from peers. There can be a lot of rejection and [teens] become highly sensitive to finding their own identity. It comes down to a matter of being accepted.”

And Dr. Linda Baker, the psychology chair at University of Maryland, Baltimore County, says that finding a simpatico peer group is almost always a healthy step. “Peers play a vital role in socialization at all periods of development,” she says. “[High school] is the time when children are actively seeking an identity, and their sense of self includes a social self. Adolescents define themselves, in large part, in terms of who their friends are. Children who are not accepted by their peers typically do not fare as well in school and in life as those who are accepted.”

As for Otakon’s over-the-top costumes, Baker says that parents shouldn’t be in the slightest bit alarmed.

“Teens learn important skills as they devote time and effort into creating the costumes,” she notes. “It is important that teens have a chance to find their passion, and to express it, even if that passion is not one that parents can readily appreciate.”

And more and more, the parents of Otakon kids do seem to appreciate the conference, and all its trappings—as long as their children take a few precautions.

For one, “the cell phone is a wonderful thing,” says Helen Hiser. In the past, a kid at such a convention would have no way of communicating with home. Now, if they need help, a ride, some money, even a safety pin to hold up a torn costume, mom and dad are just a speed-dial button away.

Also, there is safety in numbers. Most of these kids go with groups of friends (or make new friends the first time they attend) and, often, the parents become friends with each other. These relationships help ease the trepidation of dropping a child into an unfamiliar world.

“It’s a little unnerving to have your 15-year-old girl going to the convention where there are 26,000 people,” says Helen. “It was definitely a little bit of a leap of faith. But the kids were going to go in a group, and I knew the friends and their parents so there was a level of comfort in that.”

It helped that Anna’s Otakon friends are her “regular friends,” Helen says, the ones she brings home after school. “They are, without exception, smart, funny, highly imaginative, and a joy to have around. Very cool people.”

Ultimately, ghoulish or edgy as it may seem, the Otakon conference really has become something of a family affair. Whereas once popular role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons or Magic: The Gathering were played in locked basements or other “no-parents-allowed” zones, Otakon is out in the open. Families like the Martins, who live in Baltimore County, have gone so far as to reserve a downtown hotel room for the entire span of the event. (This year, Nick will be staying with them.) For out-of-town visitors, the July weekend in Baltimore is like a freaky trip to Walt Disney World.

Whether the parents actually participate in some of the conference events or just use it as an excuse to go sightseeing or shopping in Baltimore, it all speaks to the growing acceptance of the entire genre and lifestyle.

“If you’re a parent that’s worried,” Helen says, “probably the best way to sort of see what Otakon is all about is just to go.”

And Fred Hiser couldn’t be happier that his daughter is part of this eccentric and lively community. “[Anna and her friends] are able to be creative and imaginative through Otakon,” he says. “They read a lot and are really into theater and the arts, and this is just another outlet. Doing something where they aren’t taking drugs or drinking and are accepted by their friends? What more could I ask for?”

With 10 seconds left in the shift, Tim Fowler, 52, controls the bouncing puck near his own net, wheels around, and sprints toward the other end of the rink. As the clock ticks down, he zooms past two defenders, floats to his right, and fires a perfect wrist shot into the far left side of the goal. No horn blares, no sirens flash, and the only sound of adulation comes from his teammates on the bench banging their sticks against the Northwest Ice Rink’s boards. But make no mistake about it: This goal matters, since it’s put his blue team up 1-0. But there’s still plenty of hockey to be played.

For the Over the Hill Gang and dozens of other baby boomers—and a handful of men old enough to have sired them—there’s always plenty of hockey left. A small but fiercely passionate adult men’s hockey community flourishes in Baltimore, a city not known as a hockey hotbed. Yet year after year, as their skin sags and hairlines recede, their burning love for the game and the thrill it provides does not flicker.

“A couple years ago, I tore my medial collateral in my knee completely,” says Jerry Spivak, a professor of medicine and oncology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “My orthopedist said, ‘That will be your last game.'” But as a few patients have doubtlessly done to him through the years, Spivak ignored his doctor’s advice and still plays weekly.

“It’s one of those games that once you start playing, you never want to get away from it,” he says. “It’s a lot of exercise and competition, but it’s extremely challenging and enjoyable. There’s nothing better than getting out on the ice.”

Every Thursday night at 10:30, as has happened for more than 40 years, the aging Mt. Washington rink plays host to the gang of about 20 core players. On this drizzly late September evening early in the season, players’ ages range from 31 to 74, their occupations from doctor to salesman to envied retiree. Once on the ice, however, differences melt away as quickly as the stress of everyday life.

“This is the best escape in the world,” says 54-year-old Steve Cohen, who runs the group and has played with it since he was 26. Come hell or high water—or worse—the Over the Hill Gang’s games go on.

“Before I got here, we heard that a guy dropped dead of a heart attack on the ice,” Cohen recounts. “They took him away, then went on playing.”

Fortunately, there was no need to clear any victims of cardiac arrest from the playing surface tonight, and the game faces off incident-free. Fowler’s goal comes 15 minutes into the action, which starts fast but then slows. With just 18 guys tonight, the two-minute shifts seem like eternity. Some pull doubles, skating four straight minutes in a sport where professionals usually play for only about 40 second spurts. Halfway through the game, it’s knotted at 2-2. The intensity is high, but the players are able to keep a sense of perspective. No checking or hitting is allowed, and the sticks stay low.

“The score matters for about two minutes after the game,” says Bill Smillie, 57. “Then we go get a beer.”

Before Johnny U and the Colts won their first title and the Orioles wandered into town, hockey was one of Baltimore’s most popular sports. It thrived in the 1940’s and early 1950’s, when many of the city’s high schools fielded teams and competed against one another. But the on-ice death of a player, decaying facilities, and the city’s changing demographics conspired to drive it into remission.

Chris Sturm played for Forest Park High, and hasn’t been able to shake the hockey bug since. Not that he’s tried. At a spry 74, he still laces up his skates at least once a week.

“I love the competition, the thrill of sharing the contact and the camaraderie,” says Strum, who now lives in Easton. “I think if I stopped playing, I’d fall apart.”

He almost has. Strum has undergone open-heart surgery, and he plays with a pacemaker. Such maladies are no more bothersome than a hangnail to many members of the Gerihatricks, a 60-and-older team based in Laurel that competes in tournaments throughout the U.S. Each Wednesday, Strum and the group of 60-, 70-, and 80-somethings gather for scrimmages at the Gardens Ice House.

In the locker room before the game, the guys suit up while dishing out one-liners quicker than a Wayne Gretzky slap shot.

“He’s 60, but he plays like he’s 75.”

“He could once move like Bobby Orr—only difference is, Bobby Orr passed once in a while.”

But for the wrinkled faces and thinning white hair, this could be a bunch of high school kids preparing for practice.

Everyone wears a helmet with full face mask, so those who still have their own teeth don’t have to worry about losing them.

“At our age, we all wear birdcages,” says Iver Mindel, 63, of Cockeysville. “Everyone wears a cup, because you can make false teeth. . . .”

The vibe in here is Grumpy Old Men meets Slap Shot, a troop of old friends happy to see each other and grateful that their bodies have granted them another week of play.

Bill Wellington, 86, started the team in the mid 1990’s. He grew up playing hockey in Detroit during the depression, using second-hand skates and folded-up magazines for knee pads. After serving as an Army pilot in Burma during World War II, earning a degree in economics, and marrying and raising six children, he returned to the sport in the late 1960’s, before the NHL’s Washington Capitals even existed. Watching him walk into the rink from the parking lot as briskly as a tortoise, wheeling his equipment bag behind him, he looks as if he’s been playing hockey since before Washington was the capital.

As he pulls shin guards, knee pads, and other gear out of the blue bag, he points to a laminated card that lists his medical conditions, “just in case.” Prostate surgery, 1992. Hernia surgery. Sleep apnea surgery. Following not one, but two, hip-replacement surgeries, his doctors tried to convince him to give up the game, but their pleas have fallen on deaf ears.

“Hockey is an amalgam of different sports,” says Wellington, who discusses the game in almost mythical terms. “It’s got the speed of basketball, the teamwork of soccer, and the puck flies faster than most baseballs. Take all of that, and you’re on skates.”

Out on the ice, Wellington and his mates move with a stunning fluidity. With no clutching, grabbing, or checking, the pace of play is surprisingly frenetic. Hidden by their puffy padding and masks, these guys could almost be mistaken for men half their age.

Almost.

Back at Northwest Ice Rink, Mike Bittinger is playing with the fervor of a boy among men. Well, like a youngish man among older ones. The 31-year-old slithers past a pair of defensemen, deftly flips the puck over an opponent’s stick, and puts the biscuit in the basket to give the white team a 3-2 advantage. The move draws oohs and ahhs from some of the players, and a couple of sarcastic comments about his age.

“I was playing with his father before he was married,” 74-year-old Bobby Gross says as he skates off the ice for a brief moment of rest.

Bittinger’s dad, Terry, is home nursing an injury, but that doesn’t stop Mike from making the hour-plus drive from his home in Pennsylvania.

“I like coming out here because no one has egos or wants to fight, they just love to play,” he says.

The Tuesday night games at Mt. Pleasant Ice Arena can get a bit chippier. Steve Morlock has run the Mt. Pleasant No-Check Hockey League for 21 years, which despite its name, is not devoid of physicality.

“Any time you play a contact sport, there’s going to be stuff from time to time,” he says. “We have two or three altercations a year. Normally the first 15 weeks are pretty calm, then the playoffs are pretty intense. There are only four teams. You and I might play against each other and hate each other then play with each other the next session and say, ‘He’s not a bad guy.’ Or we could still hate each other.”

With referees, scorekeepers, and two 23-minute periods, the play at Mt. Pleasant is much more structured. That resonates with some players, like Baltimore County Circuit Court Judge Mickey Norman, who’s played in the league for more than 20 years.

“I find the sport philosophically fascinating,” he says. “You’re on narrow blades, you have a stick in your hand and you’re maneuvering this small object while moving faster than you normally move. You have all these things that can fly out of control at any moment. The art of it is trying to control all of that while someone is trying to run you over.”

Norman has persevered through four knee operations, though he’s quick to add that only two were hockey-related.

“The nature of the game is gliding,” he says. “One of the things I believe is that you can have injuries and still play.”

Many players echo Norman’s thoughts. Though it’s rare to talk to someone who hasn’t suffered an on-ice injury, most believe the sport is beneficial, not harmful, to their health.

“The most common things we see are knee and shoulder injuries,” says Dr. Samuel Matz, medical director of LifeBridge Health Sports Medicine. “From the standpoint that ice skating is a non-pounding sport like running, it’s less traumatic. But like any activity that people are engaged in, there’s a risk of injury. But the hockey players I talk to really love playing and they love the camaraderie. So I think, on balance, the relatively low risk of injury is not enough for me to say to these boomers they shouldn’t do it. I think it’s wonderful exercise.”

With just a few minutes left in the Thursday night game in Mt. Washington, Bill Smillie definitely would agree. Like many of the guys tonight, he’s sucking some serious wind between shifts. It’s 60.5 degrees rinkside, and everyone is sweating.

A native of Montreal, Smillie took a 30-year hiatus from the game before returning to it three years ago.

“It’s like sex—you don’t forget,” he says. “You just don’t have the legs and lungs anymore.”

When the final horn sounds, the white team has won 5-2. After a few quick congratulatory handshakes, everyone waddles into the lobby to change. Some dress quickly and head for home, others linger to socialize, and a few set out for the Curb Shop, a Falls Road bar just around the corner.

At the pub, seven guys drink Oliver Ale, made by one of their compatriots, Bill Oliver. As they have in weeks, months, years, decades past, they snack on popcorn, sip the cold brew, trade barbs, hockey stories, and laughs.

Just before 1 in the morning, Jerry Spivak heads out into the quiet fall night. In less than seven hours, he’ll be doing medical rounds again at Hopkins. But more importantly, in less than seven days, he’ll be back out on the ice.

Under a misty Saturday-evening sky, more than 50 men are spread out along the Kenwood High School track in East Baltimore, undergoing a transformation. They are pulling on pads and plastic armor, yanking at tabs and webbing straps, lowering helmets over their heads. They are construction workers, barbers, mechanics, painters, bouncers, and salesmen. But within half an hour, they will become something else entirely. They will become the city’s pre-eminent semi—professional football team. They will become the Baltimore Bears.

A loose circle has formed, and a graying, heavy-set man in a black shirt and zebra-striped pants enters it and bends on one knee. He looks up into the ring of tense faces, and begins to speak, low and earnestly. The circle pulls in close to hear.

“You guys are gentlemen,” Bears Head Coach Bill Roselle begins. “You know what to do now. You can go out and have a hell of a night against these guys.” A few beats of silence go by, filled with the trilling of cicadas. “You’ve come a long way . . .” he says, and leaves the sentence open-ended.

From one side, another coach clears his throat to break the reverent silence: “Just knock their dick-strings loose.”

And the Bears kneel to pray.

In a city starved for gridiron action, the Bears are the closest we’ve come to the Colts since the NFL team hightailed it for points west. Reigning champions of the seven-team Mason-Dixon League—which includes the Prince George’s County Stallions, the York Lions, and the Peninsula Poseidons—the Bears have won more than 70 percent of their games in the last six years. Yet the club toils away in relative obscurity, playing each autumn weekend before 250 or so fans at their home field—Patterson High School off Route 40 in East Baltimore. And most Bears followers are players’ families, friends, girlfriends, former or future team members, or any of dozens of semi-official hangers-on. The only dependable coverage they receive is in the weekly newspaper The Avenue which, not coincidentally, is operated by Bears’ general manager Ken Coldwell.

The Bears take the field in their silver, black, and white livery, their shadows cross-hatching the fresh-cut grass. Bill Roselle stalks the sidelines, already swearing steadily. The players start their calisthenics, screaming and clapping rhythmically, big and ungainly and scary and graceful in the anonymity of their outlandish outfits. The pregame tension comes pouring out now, and the players are catching passes and diving on their faces at the coaches’ whistles. They are high-fiving and knocking helmets. They are slapping butts, cruising on adrenaline. They are preparing to risk grievous injury, and they are happy to do it.

Tonight the team plays an exhibition game against the Baltimore Rams, another semi-pro team, this one from the Continental Interstate Football League. The Rams are all black, the Bears about equally mixed black and white. The Rams have won the toss, and on the Bears’ sideline, the war cries start: “Ay deFENSE! Get ready to THUMP SOME HEADS!”

The kickoff received, the Rams come to the line of scrimmage, and their quarterback shouts the night’s first cadence, a rapid Choctaw of jock-speak: “Blue Ninety-NINE! Blue! Ninety-NINE! HUT—HUT-HUT!” The linemen in the trenches slam together and a machine-gun chorus of grunting rises. A runner escapes into open ground but the freedom lasts only an instant as the Bears’ Keith Mundy administers a vicious hit, the crack of pads tearing a hole in the night. “Ay buddy, ay BUDDY! Yessss, KEITH!”

The quality of play has none of the slow fumbling which fans of high-school ball might expect; these are, after all, semi-pro players, and many of them veterans of other semi-pro gigs. There’s an intensity here: rage loosed at the workweeks end in tooth-rattling hits, in slashing runs, in passes spiraling sweet and true as arrows into taped and outstretched fingers.

The Bears take the Rams apart, 56 to 6.

It is a Tuesday night after practice, and five Bears sit reduced to human proportions in their civvies at Cheers Pub on Route 40. Officially it is Meet-the-Team Night, but the gathered Bears don’t appear to have met anyone but friends of the team who are always hanging around anyway. The Bears don’t seem to mind: all of their events end this way, with players and fans invited to the bar-of-the-night afterwards.

They are Mike “Smitty” Smith, 25, a linebacker; Mark Eberhardinger, 27, a wide receiver; and Fabio “Fab” Ferrara, 24, a running back. Smitty paints cars for a living. Fab calls himself a “hair technician.” Mark, who’s been with the team for six seasons, sells Michelin tires.

Like most Bears, Eberhardinger nurses a simmering, flame-in-the-belly dream: one day his time on the team will pay off, and he’ll make it to the big time, The Show. Indeed, one index of a player’s talent appears to be the number of scouting contacts or tryouts he has had with pro teams, whether the NFL, Canadian Football League, World League, or the arena football teams (which play an indoor, scaled-down version of the game).

Players love to recount their tryout histories, and the conversations can be as labyrinthine as discussions of lineage with an English baronet. Whoever the speaker, somehow, the impression emerges that before you sits the rightful king. Mark, for instance, has tried out for the Ottawa Bootleggers, the Washington Commandos (an arena team), and an experimental Baltimore arena team, the Claws, which rose and fell without playing a game.

“My family is behind my playing, because they know it’s just a matter of time until I make it,” he says.

His ball cap is perched on the back of his close-cropped head, and he’s talking the talk, the confidence in his voice so real that for a moment you forget how far the distance is from Cheers Pub to a spot on an NFL roster—a goal that most of the guys rarely have the guts to admit out loud.

Smitty, who played for Harford Community College, has a theory about why the Bears are Bears and not rubbing pads with Rypien and Kelly.

“I’d say about 50 percent of our starters have a legitimate shot at being pro,” he says. “But they haven’t had the breaks. In Mobile, Alabama, they play high school football games before crowds of 15,000 because the only thing they have going there is the football team. Guys who play football in places like that get known. We get nothing.”

Smitty also bemoans the thought that players are judged by standards other than athletic. “A guy might have a 3.0 [grade point average] at Maryland and the Bear had a 1.0 at Harford Community College, and that’s the only difference. A lot of our guys had athletic talent equal to players on any Division One team, but they didn’t have the grades or intelligence.”

Other grievances now bubble to the surface around the table: the $200 or more each player coughs up to fit himself out with new equipment (neither players nor coaches are paid and the Bears provide only uniforms), the other expenses that nickel-and-dime them during a season—like the $20 each player had to pay to get to the championship game last year. And then there’s the omnipresent threat of The Injury.

Anyone who is hurt playing has to depend on his own health plan, or on his family’s support. The team has been known to throw fundraisers for the wounded, but the several hundred dollars collected is a drop in the bucket next to the cost of knee surgery. Some players are not insured through work, so they risk physical and financial ruin every time they strap on the pads.

“I’ll do this until I can’t do it any more,” says Smitty, explaining what keeps him going against these odds. “People go through life, they say, ‘I could’ve, I should’ve, but I didn’t. . . .’ We do it, man.”

Ken Coldwell, a bespectacled, heavyset, bearded man with a tiny gold football helmet hanging on a gold rope around his neck, got involved with local semi-pro ball back in 1976.

That’s when his stepdaughter started bugging him to bring her to see the Wilson Point Big Blue games—”‘Dad, there’s all these cute guys on the team. . . .'” He soon became a supporter himself, traveling with the squad and walking the sidelines. In ’86, after a stint as president of one local franchise, he assembled the remains of three programs and created the Bears. The result was a regional powerhouse: 56 wins, 22 losses, and one tie, with two league championships represented by the drainpipe-sized rings on his fingers.

At five bucks a seat, you might look at the crowds and think the Bears are generating a decent chunk of revenue. That would be true were it not for the fact that each home-team player gets a pass that admits his personal entourage of four. The average gate is around $500, and a concession wagon brings in $700 a night. Add in some revenue from Bears Sportswear, a catalogue operation that supplies schools and rec councils, and there is barely enough to cover the $20,000 or so it costs to run the team each season.

Coldwell will be the first to tell you nobody goes into something like the Bears for the money. Why they allow themselves to get wrapped up in this curious game is a little harder to explain.

“There was one [newspaper] story on the final game of the season, the championship game,” Ken reminisces. “The lead was, ‘There was Ken Coldwell, running down the sidelines screaming “I love you, I love you, I love you. . . .” ‘ That’s what it’s all about.”

It is a bright, brassy Sunday afternoon at Patterson High, and the Bears are facing crosstown rival Arbutus. A grudge match.

Seven Arbutus players jumped ship to join the Bears this year, including their best talent: quarterback Joe Baker and Gary Oaks, a wide receiver as tall as his last name suggests. (He and the also-lofty Mark Eberhardinger are known as “The Twin Towers.”) Bill Roselle and the other coaches have been milling among the dressing players, admonishing them over and over again: “Keep it clean.”

The national anthem begins, and a coach screams “Hats off!” There’s no flag, so everyone just faces the blaring loudspeakers.

Last instructions from Coach Roselle: “The refs are gonna be very, very strict. Any of you guys get kicked out, William B”s gonna be pissed. You know who William B is?” He glares and taps his chest significantly.

The Bears win the toss and Smitty is smelling blood. He tells defensive lineman Gary Sollers: “I wanna see some paralyzed mothers out there today, babe.”

The offense marches down the field but can’t convert: a field goal attempt fails when the holder can’t find the handle.

Now the defense takes over and in short order there’s an interception. The players are crowding the whistle, keeping the hitting going as long as they can. The ref admonishes as a heap of tacklers and tackled sorts itself out: “You gotta play it better than that. . . .”

Ken Coldwell turns away from the play, scans the stands, and says proudly, “This is triple the amount of people we had last year.”

Back on the field, tight end Bill Grauer pulls in a high pass and an Arbutus defender chops him at the knees, sending him head over heels. The crowd surges up and bellows.

The score is 9-0 Bears just before the half, and Bears defensive back Martell Betters is stalking an Arbutus defensive back who’s lined up near the Bears sideline: “You lookin’, weak, baby, you lookin’ weak!”

“No, man, I’m lookin’ strong,” insists number 23, the defender. “You see me here now; you’ll be seein’ me on the tube, though. . . .” Martell, exasperated, calls out: “Would somebody please beat him?!”

The Arbutus player shoots back, “I got some speed, man,” but the timing of the boast couldn’t be worse. Bear Steve Williams shoots past him and breaks free for a score.

“Ayyy baby, speed that!” Martell jeers. The Bears put 13 more points on the board during the third quarter and breeze to a 22-6 victory.

But as the clock ticks off the last seconds, the day’s drama isn’t over: An oval of players and coaches is still on the field, stooped over a prone Arbutus player who has gone down on the final play. There’s blood soaking through a white towel held to his left shin, where the shattered tibia projects through the skin. Droplets of blood speckle his arms, his throat, his jersey. Two teammates are holding his hands. Bear lineman Wayne Defrancesco, who is a Baltimore firefighter, has stripped off helmet and shoulder pads and is already cutting a splint to fit, working smoothly with the ambulance attendants.

To the side, someone mutters the dreaded words “career-ending injury.”

Back at Cheers, the parking lot is packed. The Bears and their fans have converged for the postgame celebration, and more are arriving as time passes. The win has rendered quarterback coach Wayne Paul philosophical: “[Football] is glamorized by the media, but it’s just a magnification of life. See, these guys play the game for the violence. There’s no other reward. They don’t get paid, they don’t get to do commercials. All they have, all they take with them, the rest of their life, is what those hits feel like, and the glory they get while they’re doing it.”

He rucks up a zebra-striped pantleg. “See this?” He has the familiar athlete’s scar snaking around his knee. “I took a hit, and they couldn’t even find my kneecap. That young man who got his leg broken today was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And he’s living his worst nightmare now. He’ll never play again.”

Smitty, too, is brooding about the injury at the game’s end. “That poor guy layin’ on the field,” he says, shaking his head and puckering a bruised brow. “You have to ask yourself ‘Hey, is it worth it?”lt can happen to anybody, anytime.”

At last the buffet is laid out: meatballs, macaroni salad, barbecued chicken, and potato salad to go with the pitchers. The chafing dishes are decimated within minutes. At the linemen’s table the volume is deafening. They’re shouting each other down, ranking on each other, banging the table, shoving each other, bragging, and feeling good.

Someone cranks up the big-screen TV: Channel 2’s evening sports program is on, and a storm of shushes quiets the bar, riveting attention on the broadcast. Finally, after an eternity of golf and tennis coverage, the Bears get their 50 seconds of glory. The Footage shows linebacker Kevin Rowley pulling in an interception and he’s back in the spotlight again, soaking up the moment. He’s on his feet now, shouting, fist pumping, exultant. “Who’s that?! Who’s that?! Who’s that?!”