A Party to Remember: Frank Longo's Excellent Birthday

, we located the gaggle of preteen miscreants as they played various disorganized games of neighborhood football. Today, we present the stunning conclusion in a game that meant everything, yet meant nothing. Cue Beethoven’s Fifth and the 1812 Overture simultaneously – it’s that dramatic.

On Frank Longo’s twelfth birthday, his parents threw him the perfect party, with a little surprise in the guest list. Not only were all the St. Bernard’s boys there, but Mr. Longo invited the Fitzgerald brothers, Kevin and Tommy. They were from Battle Hill, and believe me, if you were from Highlands, you didn’t want to mess with the Hill. There was no trip to McDonald’s, no outing to the bowling alley. There were no clowns, no eight-foot wooden Foghorn Leghorn signs announcing his birthday in front of the Longo house. There were just sixteen boys, a Nerf football and a flatbed pickup truck.

Mr. Longo piled us all in the truck for the half-mile ride up to Highlands School. We got out at the field hockey field, made teams and started the game, Mr. Longo puffing on Parliaments to keep his hands warm on that cold, gray December afternoon. NFL Films should have been there at the frozen tundra of Highlands Field to capture the cold breath billowing from each player’s mouth, the crew socks with the NFL stripes proclaiming our love for Earl Campbell’s Houston Oilers or the Oakland Raiders’ Commitment to Excellence, the wooly gloves and knit hats being chucked to the side as the heat within our little bodies overwhelmed the cold outside

We played for what seemed like hours, and those Battle Hill boys weren’t any tougher than our crowd. I remember catching a bomb from Frank on the last play of the game to win it for my team, running the last twenty yards to the cage a few steps ahead of Jimmy Claroni. That is definitely not the way it happened, but that’s how I remember it. We headed back to the Longos for hot chocolate and birthday cake, and we all made it home for Wide World of Sports, the thrill of victory still coursing through my veins, the agony of defeat for the losing team assuaged by hot chocolate and ice-cream cake.

Could that same party happen today? Probably not. For one thing, there were winners and there were losers (and about three minutes after the game ended, it didn’t matter which one you were). Today, nobody’s a loser. Everyone is rewarded for participation. For another thing, the cost of the party amounted to enough Quik and cake for sixteen boys. How can you have a good party today without spending a few hundred dollars? (Yes, guilty as charged, hoisted by my own petard, as it were.)

Super Bowl CCMDXVI looms sometime in our future, around the time of the last Batman and Fast and the Furious sequels. It will be played in a temperature-controlled domed stadium with luxury boxes, sit-down restaurants and other mall-esque amenities. But I can’t imagine a game that will compare in importance to those we played every day at the Church in the Highlands, in our own makeshift uniforms by our own makeshift rules. While today’s games belong to parents and television networks, those games were the exclusive property of us, never to be reproduced again in any form except by the written permission of our memories.

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Two little things before I bid you adieu. First, something happens in the universe when you write your stories. A few years ago, I had printed a copy of this story so I could give it to football coach extraordinaire Joe Ditolla, but I didn’t seem him before school ended and I had to hustle back to White Plains to submit a building permit. Who do I see standing outside the offices of the White Plains Building Department? That’s right, Vinnie (Mr.) Longo, smoking a Parliament. I gave him the copy so he could give it to Frank. Word on the street this week is that Mr. Longo isn’t doing so great, so if you’re in the habit of sending good thoughts or prayers in the direction of people you don’t know, send them to Mr. Longo.

Second, so what if the original project was put on a shelf? Let’s try to resurrect this idea. If you have a story from your disorganized sporting childhood, write it, email it to me, and my space here on Patch will be your space. Need more incentive? Write about the stuff you and your friends did three or four or five decades ago, and I ga-ron-tee you they will come (very Field of Dreams of me).