Only a few things have changed since the last time you were at a high school football game. The majority of people there are still not actually watching any part of the game at all. But the kids playing sure seem a lot bigger than they used to be.
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The smell of cologne still hangs heavy in the air, but it’s no longer English Leather, and the 17-year-old boys wearing it are carrying cell phones and look like they just stepped out of Tommy Hilfiger ads.
On this particular Friday night at Niles West High School, there were your usual number of couples locked at the hip and the same cop leaning against the fence who was leaning against the fence 20 years ago.
There were also the girls self-consciously tugging at their hair and the goofy senior guys with the school name painted on their collective chests, and a whole lot of people just happy not to be home in front of a television for a couple of hours.
If it wasn’t exactly a state of denial that consumed the 2,000 or so people who watched Niles West play host to Glenbrook North on homecoming in Skokie, it was escapism at its finest.
There were some reservations about whether they should be playing the game at all just three days after the horrific events of Tuesday. Even as late as Friday, the athletic directors of both schools were prepared to cancel the game. But then they received the fax for which they had been waiting, the one sent to every school in the nation from President Bush explaining that for the kids of this country, anyway, it was time to move on.
“He called Friday a national day of prayer and remembrance,” said Bob Pieper, the Glenbrook North AD. “Not a national day of mourning. If it was a day of mourning, then we were going to cancel.”
And so they prayed. And they remembered with a long moment of silence. And then they sang the national anthem, waved flags, held candles, held hands and got back to the business of being a community again.
This was not the NFL or major-college football. And, putting aside the $2 tickets, it was certainly not high-priced entertainment. These were kids who have spent most of the last four days talking about almost nothing other than death and destruction.
Despite what we think about the jaded nature of today’s youth, they of the Internet/violent computer game/Columbine generation, this was a tough week for teenagers too.
“The kids have been somber all week,” said Mike Riggle, principal of Glenbrook North. “Today we had three minutes of silence, and it was probably five to eight minutes before you heard a sound in the school.
“I had mixed emotions about how to handle this, but I think it’s important to show that we’re back in the flow of things. And high school football is one of the best ways for a community to get back in the flow.”
At Niles West they canceled the homecoming parade and redefined the homecoming pep rally.
“We had poetry readings, teachers spoke and it was just a different tone,” Niles West Principal Roger Stein said. “It wasn’t somber and we sort of transitioned into a celebratory thing, but it was muted enough that it was clear this was not a rah-rah assembly.”
At both high schools, the TVs were on continuously, the students inundated perhaps even more than their parents were by the same frightening images all week. There were counselors available for and utilized by the kids for whom this was all too much.
This is not high school most of us remember. There are security guards, even in the suburbs, as well as metal detectors, and many more undercover cops than that one familiar narc whose cover was known to every freshman.
Kids are savvier in a way that’s a little scary. They’re also smarter.
“There are problems here; this is high school,” Niles West senior Seth Reagen said. “But something this big, whatever differences we’ve had between each other, are put on the back burner.
“Eventually we’ll all digress and go back to the way we were before Tuesday, but no matter what, we all went through Tuesday together. And tonight, at a school that is very ethnically diverse, kids who came from places 10,000 miles away are sitting here waving American flags in America’s darkest hour.”
Somehow, in the midst of everything, it just all seemed right.
“I think they needed this,” said Tim O’Reilly, whose kids attend Niles West, gesturing to the field. “I think we all did.”
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