Declan “Deco” Rourke always said that a man does not realize he is drowning until something finally gives him a reason to shout. For most people in their neighborhood, that reason was drink, or a fight, or some horse winning an absurd bet, or some woman leaving and coming back again as if the house were an illness she could not quite shake. For Deco, that summer in eighty-eight, the reason was football. Not football as a sport, not tactics, not the wisdom of newspaper men talking as if God Himself had given them a private line to the center circle. For Deco it was something else. It was the idea that for once in his life he would step outside the narrow loop of work, pub, bills, his mother’s complaining, and his father’s death, which had left behind nothing but a coat still smelling faintly of cigarettes and rain.