The poetry, the symmetry, the sweetness and — not to be minimized — the sadness of the 2016 Army football season came together on a magical and deeply meaningful Saturday evening in Baltimore.
Yes, the simple fact of beating Navy meant everything to the 2016 Black Knights, for reasons that don’t require any unpacking or added context. Beating Navy, stripped of extra details, is momentous on its own terms — it always has been and always will be.
Yet, the story of Army in 2016 — even with a bowl chapter waiting to be written — has already been established, never to change: The context of Saturday’s win over Navy is precisely what made the moment that much more lasting and iconic.
Yes, stopping a 14-game losing streak in one of the most treasured sporting events in the United States is an earthquake of joy without need for sidebar stories or underlying tension points. However, those components of the journey make Army’s achievement that much richer.
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Rudyard Kipling, in his most-remembered and quoted poem, famously wrote, “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same…”
Notions of gain and loss, victory and brokenheartedness, can easily be tossed around in ways which minimize severe occurrences and magnify the less important ones. Right off the bat, the loss of a person, a friend, a brother, means so much more than the outcome of a football game. It doesn’t even rise to the level of debate that every Army player, coach, administrator and fan would rather have Brandon Jackson alive and whole than winning Saturday’s game over Navy. Of course every person would feel that way.
The complicated — and complicating — aspect of life is this: In the face of death, or injustice, or grave suffering — the things which make our hearts break most profoundly — human beings can’t stop living. Time and space can be carved out to grieve, to mourn, to lament, but life goes on. It is an easy and very understandable instinct to feel guilty about living — or enjoying something fun — in the days and weeks and months after a beloved person dies.
This momentous event just happened. A dear friend was lost… and we’re here discussing a kid’s game by dissecting Xs and Os or evaluating coaches? Enjoying life, relishing competition, can feel hollow in the immediate aftermath of death — the severity of the loss dwarfs, in real magnitude and significance, the score of any game or the escapism involved in enjoying entertainment before returning to the business of serving and defending a country at a service academy.
This is why enjoying life can feel — in the immediacy of grief — like a dismissal of the value of the person we’ve lost. It can come across like that.
But as we come to know in time — as we understand when we see more of death around us and become more familiar with it — enjoying life is a courageous choice. It’s anything but a dismissal of death or the people we lose in our earthly sojourn.
Playing — then winning — a football game, against Navy or any other team, doesn’t honor Brandon Jackson because it’s football; the venture honors Jackson because of the effort it took, the passion poured forth, in a spirit of remembrance and love.
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Brandon Jackson entered this 2016 season intent on beating Navy and ending The Streak, just as much as his West Point brothers. Beating Navy genuinely does give honor to Jackson and his memory, but what’s extra special — and contextual — about Saturday’s game is the way in which the Black Knights won it.
That’s almost certainly the detail Jackson would have appreciated the most.
It’s not a complicated story to tell; it’s simply a supremely powerful one: Army couldn’t beat Navy in recent years because it couldn’t figure out the fourth quarter. The drive the 2011 team couldn’t make; the drive Trent Steelman almost made in 2012; the drive the 2015 offense wasn’t able to forge — these almosts lent extra frustration and negative energy to The Streak.
This is why — without any need for embellishment or exaggeration — what we saw on Saturday in Baltimore will ripple through the pages of time as an immortal moment in West Point football history.
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A year ago, Chris Carter dazzled Army football fans, offering the suggestion that he would be the man to break The Streak in 2016. What a fascinating plot twist it is — and always will be — that Ahmad Bradshaw not only took Carter’s place, but made the downfield journey his teammate almost made in 2015.
That game-winning march — the most significant and storied march for any West Point football team since the 10-win 1996 season — was magnified by the fact that yes, in a moment of great consequence and overwhelming pressure, Army was able to pass the ball. Bradshaw, on a downfield strike at the start of the drive and then on the shovel pass which avoided a fourth-and-seven worst-case scenario for the Black Knights, rose above his own — and his offense’s — long-term limitations, which had lingered through the past 14 years.
Bradshaw and Army punctuated the drive with successful and powerful runs, but without that small and crucial dose of passing prowess, this fabulous fourth quarter — this drive West Point fans and alumni had longed for since 2001 — would not have come to be.
If there is indeed a benevolent and all-loving God, as many of us believe, Brandon Jackson is smiling about this, tickled pink that Bradshaw and his other teammates were able to win in this way.
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The postscript: Had Army breezed to a 24-0 win and coasted in the second half, everyone would have said, “Oh, Navy simply had all these players injured. No wonder Army finally won. The team was due, Navy got the bad breaks. Next year, it will be different.”
The fact that Navy rallied to take a lead — and began to create the same in-game pattern which had applied in recent years — took most if not all of that narrative off the table.
Winning THIS way, after falling behind and carrying the burden of HAVING to score in the fourth quarter to win, made the lifting of the burden — the ending of The Streak — the memory of a lifetime for Army people across the globe.
Context, one one hand, doesn’t matter at all when one wins the Army-Navy Game. Yet, on so many levels, the context is exactly what magnifies this story… and the achievements of a team which just earned a deservedly eternal place in West Point football lore.
