Going 0-10 over the course of a high school football season sucks.
I would try to be a little more poetic, but no other word sums it up as succinctly. You start in the scorching August heat and finish in the frigid November wind.
Running, hitting, hurting, vomiting, bleeding. With nothing to show in the end.
Three to four months out of that precious short amount of time that is high school. Gone.
But not all is lost, even when all are lost. Fond memories can still be created in a winless campaign. Locker-room jokes, busting chops, bus rides, those rare triumphant moments on the field that just weren't quite enough to get the job done.
Seymour had that last year. The 0-10 season. But the Wildcats are now perfect, the one perfect team in Connecticut, at least for a day. They beat O'Brien Tech 42-14 on Wednesday night in the only game on the state schedule. The rest of the state's teams will get their chance to start off perfectly over the next few days.
But now O'Brien Tech is faced with that 0-10 possibility that was Seymour's reality last season. One might say it's a probability. A program's first varsity season is never easy. Especially when it doesn't get a year of JV action under its belt first.
It's nothing to be ashamed of. The Condors split with Derby after a four-year co-op situation, and they're on their own. It's all uphill right now. But they knew that going in, and Seymour reinforced it.
Whether it's inexperience, a lack of size, a lack of numbers or Gov. Malloy, the Condors will face adversity, and they'll need to crawl before they fly.
I've been there.
In the fall of 1997 I quarterbacked St. Paul-Bristol to an 0-10 season. What made it even worse was the 7-3 season I enjoyed from the bench the year before. A share of the Northwest Conference title with Berlin and Farmington. I helped give it all back. My coach reminded me of that. A few times.
It was an awful season, but it's easier to laugh about it now. Sure wasn't then.
Being a Catholic school, we had a pretty strict dress code (khakis, white or blue button-down, tie) but on game days, we got to wear our jerseys over the shirt and tie. Always looked forward to that. There was a genuine sense of pride my freshman and sophomore years. We even had pep rallies.
But junior year, on the Fridays when I slipped on the red, white and blue No. 10, it was embarrassing. In the matter of a year, the girls in school went from "Oh, you're on the football team?" to "..."
Cold shoulders. I think I detected sympathy too.
And there were no pep rallies.
Our games went from being an event people wanted to be at, to just being a place where other students could get drunk or high and go to and not get caught by their parents.
We had five road games. We were the visiting opponent for five homecomings. I kid you not. We were the visiting team for a homecoming game in the middle of September. College kids weren't even moved into their dorms yet and they had a homecoming game to come back to.
Senior year wasn't much better, but we did get a win. E.O. Smith was in its first year of varsity play. We went up to Storrs and escaped with a 31-28 victory. We finished the year 1-9.
E.O. Smith, and St. Paul for that matter, went on to bigger and better things. So will Seymour.
And so will O'Brien Tech.