Hi,

I know this is a terrible time for everyone, but I want to add something to the blog:

Sean and I used to play football together at Nordhoff High when we were freshmen, but I didn't really know him at the time.

All the other guys except me (I thought) had played for the Eagles for a few years before so when I began my very first year of organized football I felt a little overmatched and underweight. It was as if I was walking into a movie halfway through, knowing there was a quiz at the end. I remember one day we were in a receiver drill with Coach Coleman throwing passes. As I went out on a post pattern, Coleman's pass sailed high into the air, and like anyone ambitious enough to want to start, I leaped high into the air to catch it. Andy Dalto was playing safety and waiting for me to come down before blasting me into the sticker filled grass. All I remember is a football helmet colliding with my chest, then echoes (the cliche of someone knocked out), then a circle of helmet covered heads asking me if I was OK. I was told later I was out for fifteen seconds, but it felt like no time at all.

I jumped up and jogged back to the huddle, unable to steer myself in any straight direction. Coach Burns saw me swerving and told me to sit out the next play. I stood there, feeling strange and numb, tears - not crying tears, but tears of someone whose brain was shaken a bit much, running down my face.

I remember Sean standing next to me, helmet on his head asking me, "you all right?" and I remember me feeling very uncool at the time trying to pretend like I didn't just have my head scrambled, because Sean was one of the cool kids, he had this aura of invincibility, and I felt as if I needed to prove myself to stack up.

Now this story seems a bit superficial, but it has a point: Sean never was too cool for anyone. He was just so fun loving that people who didn't know him so well, like me, were a bit envious him and people he associated with. But once I got to know him over the course of that first sweaty season of Ranger football I wish I could go back to that time when I got knocked out and he asked me how I was, because I wouldn't have played it cool. I would have told him the truth, that I was just hit by Mike Tyson and felt like a mental patient with jellybrains, and I know he would have laughed that low gutteral haw haw I can still hear when I think about it hard enough. And I would have laughed back because it was funny that two skinny surfers were sweating through hell week when we could have been riding C-street south swells. . Because now when I think about it, Sean was a lot cooler and friendlier than I ever pictured him before I knew him. Our lives went in different directions, but the meager time I did spend with him was memorable enough to make an impression.

-Miles Robertson