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we approached.
    “You’re from the States?” I said.
    He gave a slight nod but kept his focus on the field.
    I sat down beside him all the same. Moose sat on the other side. “Mathieu Dumas,” I told him and offered my hand. “My friends call me Matt.”
    “Freeman B…,” he said. It sounded like Bay-HAN-zin, or something like that.
    “Moussa Oussekine,” Moose said, and he threw out his hand for a soul-brother shake. All the Diables shook that way; it surprised me at first too, and this black guy, Freeman, was looking kind of suspiciously at Moose for doing it.
    The senior Diables kicked off—a good kick, high and deep. Their coverage team tagged the returner, and the American was like, “Oh, dang!”
    “Fabrice, there,” Moose said in English, “is the most hard hitter on the senior side.”
    “That was not particularly friendly,” the American said in French, “for a ‘friendly’ game.” His French was a little stiff, and he had a heavy accent. Still, you had to like the effort.
    “The French are odd that way,” I told him. “They call pre-season games ‘friendlies,’ as though guys in plastic armor ramming into each other could ever be warm and fuzzy.”
    “You are not French?” he said, using the formal vous for me instead of tu .
    “Canadian. From Montreal,” I responded in English.
    “But you”— vous again—“reside here?”
    “For the season. I play on the junior team. I’m going to coach a bit too.”
    He looked surprised. “Junior like JV ?” he asked in English.
    “The Under-20 division. One of fifteen or so clubs, across two divisions. It’s club teams here,” I explained, “not affiliated with schools like back home, so no varsity and JV .”
    “They pay you to do it? To coach and play?”
    “Insurance, an allowance for my cousin who boards me and for my meals and subway fare.”
    “Nice gig,” he said.
    On the field, the senior Diables had the ball and were driving toward the end zone. They were methodical—a dive that gained four yards, a sweep that went for eight.
    Freeman turned to Moose. “You too?” He kept to English.
    “No, I am French.”
    “French? Right,” he said a little snarkily. “But what I’m asking is, they pay you to play?”
    “Ha! This is only for the foreign ‘talent.’” He reached across Freeman and nudged me. “To keep this one from getting too sick for home and running back to his maman .” Then he put his fists to his eyes and made a wah-wah crying gesture.
    I shoved him, and he slapped at my hand, but Freeman leaned out from between us, a little peeved, and we stopped. “So is it the regular season over here right now then?” he asked.
    “The French have to do everything their own way,” I said, for Moose’s benefit more than to answer Freeman’s question. “They play January to April here.”
    “Hear tell y’all Canadians ain’t so different, doing things your own way.” I hardly understood his English. “Three downs instead of four, twenty-yard end zones, playoffs in October…”
    “And not just with football,” I said. “Here, they call hot dogs ott doe-gue .” I pronounced it like Inspector Clouseau would. “In Quebec, we call them chiens chauds .”
    Literally hot and dog .
    “Like a little Dachshund puppy in a bun,” he said, “steam rising all up off him.”
    And he and I laughed.
    Moose didn’t. He looked like he couldn’t follow what we were saying. He said, “I will be honest, my teammates and I”—he pointed to our guys, who were all looking up at us—“we thought that maybe you were a spy from the Jets.”
    “A spy? Ha! Before yesterday I didn’t even know y’all played here.”
    “Do you play?” Moose asked him.
    “Yeah. Back home.”
    “I could tell,” I said, in French to make sure Moose could stay in the conversation. Freeman wore a gaudy ring—a school ring, I’d thought at first, but maybe it was a championship ring. “Where’s home?” I asked him.
    “San