If youth lacrosse operated like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), team matchups would be selected not on the basis of age or skill level but in order to maximize the humiliation, confusion, and degradation of the organizers’ political enemies.
The coaches, taking cues from their organizer overlords, would set game times to ensure maximum suffering on the part of the targeted players, with the playoffs kicking off on a Monday at 10 p.m. after an eight-hour-long practice, and the state tournament face-off following immediately thereafter, at 2 a.m.
Coaches would give large and powerful players a list of small and less powerful players whom they would be instructed to stalk, sneak up on, and take out of play.
But as it would turn out, quite often those less powerful players would not actually be lacrosse players at all. The powerful would have been told to stalk and pounce on, say, a retired grandfather who had been assigned to the attack position, or a confused toddler standing in the goal box.
Instead of wearing appropriate protective gear that matches the physicality of the game, the powerful would instead be equipped with outfits and equipment unsuited to the occasion, like medieval suits of armor, or gladiator get-ups.
The powerful would also be armed with sticks made of reinforced steel and fitted with bayonets on the heads, which they would use to intimidate their prey, and maybe poke and prod them, just for kicks, when no one was watching.
(Fortunately for them, no one is ever watching. There are no refs at these games.)
Mid-game, organizers would resize the goal box, reset the midline, replace the hard balls with grenades, and do away with penalties for unfair slashes. They would then state that the game should never have been played differently and that this was, in fact, the only way the game should be played going forward, and erase all evidence of the game’s honorable history of striving to ensure fair play.
Clutching their own miniature bayonet sticks, the next generation of players would closely observe their powerful heroes, both live on the sidelines and on video replays at home, and take careful note of what the “rule of law” looks like in “the land of the free and the home of the brave” in 2025.
The powerful, ashamed of their behavior, would not only not wear jerseys to identify themselves by team name and player number, they would hide from view every identifying feature but their eyes. They would turn their faces away from cameras in the hope of blending in with the rest of their teammates and avoiding accountability.
In this effort, they would succeed for a while, until, inevitably, they would fail.
“The price of greatness is responsibility.” — Winston Churchill, speaking of the United States in 1943.
