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stairs sticky with soda and Cracker Jacks, the air thick with heat rub and hot dogs, you’d hear the roar growing with every step and then the whole thing would burst like a multicolored shell, thunderous and overwhelming: fifty teams, six hundred runners camped out in patches of yellow and blue and maroon on the dark wooden bleachers over the track, stretching, sleeping, listening to their transistor radios, warming up, and there, only yards away, another heat ready to go, eight runners at the end of the straight shaking it out then kicking into the blocks, “Runners, set …” the gun like the crack of a whip, jump-starting your heart. It was like entering the Coliseum.
    The Bishop Loughlin Games, the Cardinal Hayes Invitational, these were our Olympics, but nothing I saw there those three years came close to what I saw that first time.
    They may have been from Boys’ High—I don’t remember. It doesn’t matter. What I remember is the attitude, the stance. The concentration, the focus, the four of them exchanging a few words at the beginning of each heat, then the lead-off climbing into the blocks. Fifty yards away you could feel it: black, ghetto, just off the subway in mismatched sweats, they didn’t own shit but by God they owned this. The mile relay. It was theirs. Six years in a row they’d beaten every team in the city: teams with money, teams with facilities, teams five times their size. Nobody else in any event had a record like it. Nobody even came close.
    When the mile relay final was announced, the great hall quieted, the transistors were turned down, the crowd—two, maybe three thousand—moved as close to the rail above the track as they could. I was jammed in with Frank, Falvo, the mustached kid from my group. Kennedy and McCann were a short way down, leaning over the rail. I could see the muscles in McCann’s face jumping like he was chewing something; when Kennedy looked up our eyes met over the backs of the others for a second and he nodded, barely seeing me, as if to say, “Here we go.”
    They said a few words, heads bent, then the lead-off walked to the blocks. Big Afro, bouncy stride, he was the last to take off his sweats. We watched him shake out the muscles in his legs, not looking at the others, then fold himself like a supple jackknife into the blocks, the neon-green baton between the palm and forefinger of his right hand. Everything was critical, each leg a full-out quarter-mile sprint through the track’s flat, tight wooden curves where elbows flew and tangled legs regularly sent runners sprawling across the splinter-filled boards. The lead-off runners would keep their lane through the first curve, then break for the inside as best they could.
    “Runners, there will be two commands, then the gun.”
    The place was silent. Reverent. Substitute the smell of heat rub for incense and you’ve got it. On the opposite side of the bleachers a tiny voice was singing something from a radio someone hadn’t turned down enough.
    “Marks. Set.”
    He rose, balanced on the thumb and three fingers of his right hand.
    T HREE THOUSAND RUNNERS jumped at the gun. I remember being hypnotized by the controlled fury of it, swept up in the brutal, beautiful momentum of it, and then he was down, hard, his head actually banging on the boards, the green baton ricocheting off the guard wall like a hockey puck and a groan of shock and disbelief went up from the stands. It was over. This was a mile relay. Another runner was lying on his back in the outer lane, stunned.
    I don’t think he ever thought of not going. We saw him roll, scrabble onto all fours, already searching for the baton, snatch it and go. A few people laughed, embarrassed for him: There was something almost clownish in his desperation; in the first few seconds, disoriented, he’d looked the wrong way as the baton skittered across the track behind him. Then a polite ripple of applause rose from the stands: It was the right move, the admirable