HOLLYWOOD — The lights came on over the Hollywood High field a little before kickoff on Friday, drawing the usual small congregation — parents, a knot of students, a few alumni who never quite stopped coming — to watch the Sheiks open their season.
For most of the first half, it was not the opener they had hoped for. Hollywood, fielding a young team that graduated much of last year’s roster, fell behind by two scores to a visiting squad that was bigger up front and controlled the early clock. At halftime the home side trailed and the bleachers had gone quiet, the particular quiet of people deciding how disappointed to let themselves be.
The second half was a different game. The Sheiks’ sophomore quarterback, settled down after a rough first quarter, strung together the drives that had eluded him early, and a defense that spent the first half on its heels began getting off the field. A short touchdown run midway through the fourth quarter tied the score; a two-point conversion, on a play the coach admitted afterward he had not planned to use so soon, put Hollywood ahead for good.
“We told them at the half that nobody remembers the first quarter of the first game,” said the Sheiks’ head coach, who is in his second season and coached several of these players in a youth league before they reached high school. “They remember whether you quit. These guys didn’t quit.”
The win, by a field goal’s margin in the end, is a small thing in the arc of a season, and the coach was careful not to inflate it. The team is young. The schedule stiffens. There are things to clean up — penalties, a punt game that nearly cost them, a habit of starting slow that a better opponent will punish. But a season-opening comeback is a currency of its own with a young group, proof they can absorb a bad start and win anyway.
The crowd, for its part, got its money’s worth. A student section that had been subdued at the half was on its feet by the end, and a cluster of alumni near the fence traded the kind of talk that only a comeback produces, half about the game in front of them and half about games decades gone. One man said he had been coming to these openers since the seventies, and that the field looked the same to him every September, only the kids changing.
Afterward the players gathered at midfield, took a knee while the coach said a few words, and then broke for the parking lot and whatever a Friday night holds for a teenager who just won. The lights stayed on a while longer over the empty field. Then those went off too, and the season, one game old, belonged to whatever came next.