Goooooooooaaaaalllll!

I saw an ad for this place a couple of months ago when I was at my friend Mark's house. We did online research. I was intrigued. I e-mailed them to see if they could slot me into a low-pressure, just-for-fun team.

And they did! The first game was last week, but I totally missed it. The girl who works there called me at six in the afternoon to tell me my first game was at nine that night. Can't make it!

But in the week since I got some shin guards and soccer socks to cover the shin guards and apparently that's all you need. I got there early last night, paid my fee, and went in to watch the game before mine.

The field is small - a little bigger than a basketball court, maybe - and the game is fast. No real defenders or forwards - everyone follows the ball up and down the field. The goalkeeper coming out of the box to take the ball downfield is not unusual.

I played defense and stayed near the goal when I played. Twenty years ago. I feared I might be run into the ground.

I got together with my team seconds before the game started. It was me, the black guy, the Vietnamese guy, and the two Latino guys. We looked like a Benetton ad.

And they're all good, able to do those tricky start-stop dribbles that I was always hopeless at. And thin, and in their early twenties.

I spent a lot of time on the bench - I probably played twenty minutes of a fifty minute game. I must get in better shape and lose twenty pounds before next week.

Not that it went badly! I made some good defensive plays, clearing the ball in dangerous situations, and I don't think any goals got scored because I screwed up. The game ended in a 12-12 tie, which I was more than happy with. My team pretty much liked me, and they told me I could come back next week.

The team we played against, though, was a bunch of guys about my age. And there were thousands of them! They were constantly substituting players. When you consider our entire bench consisted of me versus their platoon of fresh, unwinded guys you can see we didn't do so badly. And by "we" I basically mean "the other guys." Must contribute more next week.