Page 135 of Who's Playing You
But alas, that’s the nature of the paths that we had taken which had brought us to this time and place.
I looked up to the VIP box where my heart was.
Scottie and baby-girl bean were there along with my parents and both sisters. Atticus and Trina were keeping them in good company along with Papas and his girl Noelle, Loving’s girl Valentina and his family.
I couldn’t help the tinge of regret and sadness that I felt for Nik and how his season had come to a screeching halt. After the Super Bowl, I vowed that I’d work with him day and night to prove the doctors wrong… they just had to be wrong.
He had come to accept his new reality though. But I sure as fuck wasn’t accepting their diagnosis, their recovery timeframe was fucking bullshit as were their recovery statistics.
Oh right, I almost forgot to update y’all: Loving, Papas and I kissed and made up shortly after our big sex club / draft fixing blow-out in early December.
A week after our disastrous FaceTime confession, we’d had another conversation. One where Papas just about lost his shitand read both Loving and me the absolute fucking riot act. He threw the book at us, but mostly me, before he dropped his own bombshell.
Turns out that we had all been keeping some pretty big secrets.
We were all straight now though, no more secrets.
But if you’re a nosy Karen and want to get all the tea, including what happened to Papas, you’ll have to read both Loving and Papas’ stories. *wink*
We were deep in the fourth quarter with barely any time left on the clock. This was really it - now or never.
Dreams would come true or be shattered in the next seconds.
The Drillers and my fellow Rage had been fighting with everything they had to try to win that ring and the coveted title of best team of the year. Both of our teams deserved to be here, respectively we had had incredible seasons.
The Rage were the underdogs though. Absolutely no one would have expected us to be here, and who was I kidding? At the start of the season, no one would have expected us to even win more than a couple games, if we were lucky.
But we proved them all wrong.
We were one of the most winning teams this entire season, only having lost two games.
Under my leadership, we showed the world that with the right mindset and work ethic, that you can absolutely achieve any-fucking-thing that you set your mind to.
Our Cinderella story was the stuff that movies were made of. Atticus had been eating this up and he was being approached left and right by all kinds of companies and organizations wanting topartner with The Rage as well as our players individually. They wanted some of our magic.
As an entity, we had decided we’d show a united front and would only do promo shit as a group. There was no onediva.
Believe me, I see the irony of this.
This approach had thrown the entire world into a tizzy. And we had literally become the hottest thing to ever happen since The Beatles or Taylor Swift’s last world tour. Believe it or not, we were a bigger deal.
But I digress.
Seconds on the clock. The fourth quarter of the final game of the season. The fucking Super Bowl.
The Drillers were leading us by four points. I stared at the scoreboard one more time, noting the 25-21 score as well as how much time we had left on the clock. I only had one shot left to win this thing and make history. No one team had gone from being the worst team to Super Bowl champs.
But I was all about absolutely destroying assumptions and setting records.
“Come on Rage,” I mumbled to myself. “We got this. Let’s go Soba.” In addition to giving the team pep talks, I would on occasion need to give myself one, and if ever there was a time for a self-pep talk, it was now.
The pressure of being the first pick to being the team’s hope along with all of the chatter and BS about if I’d live up to the hype hadn’t really made any impact on my headspace. But right now, I needed to make sure that I stayed focused. I knew that the commentators were surely going off, talking about us being this dark horse and wondering if I lived up to the hype.
Was The Diva as good as he had projected to the world and claimed to be?
Well, the proof was in the pudding. And I planned to prove that yet again in these final seconds.
As I scanned the field, waiting for everyone to get themselves together and hustle on or off the field, depending on where they were supposed to go, I took in the energy of the stadium. It was absolutely electric. The crowd was so fucking loud that I could barely hear myself think.
