by Benny Lim
― Winston Churchill
February, 2009. The park was poorly lit. The space was inadequate. Attendance was not even enough to form one line. It did not matter. Water bottles were used in place of cones. Drills were run regardless. Scrimmage was in the form of a hotbox. On this night, a small group of friends decided to do something together without any promise of succeeding. It was a decision to make something out of nothing.
Fast forward to 2012. It has been almost 4 years since that fateful night, and I constantly look back at how far we have come. We were bottom-feeders not too long ago. We played games with just a line and a half with 1-2 girls on the roster. I still cannot believe how we managed to bumble our way from scraping for scraps in Pool C to going toe-to-toe with Pool A juggernauts. It's like a feel-good script from a Hollywood sports flick.
It is too easy to overlook how far up the river you've gone when it all looks the same from inside the boat. You'd have to stand by the shore to realize the boat is no longer visible in the horizon.
20 years from now, I am fairly certain I would still be thinking about the absurdity and the audacity of the things we have done and how we managed to actually pull it off. 20 years from now, I would have attended my teammates' weddings and their children's baptisms. 20 years from now, we would laugh about everything and drink into the wee hours of the night, reminiscing the glory days.
It's hard to fathom what we did 4 years ago. But it's not so hard to imagine the conversations we'll be having 20 years from now.