Not his spine, though that was at risk after being flagged for “excessive posture.”
Not his will to lead, either.
What broke was his belief that playing the game right would ever mean winning today.
The scoreboard said it all:
Soash’s Team: 92
Redd’s Team: -3
(A rare “dishonour penalty” had been assessed for “unimaginative water breaks.”)
Redd gathered his team near the benches. Most were sweating, panting, and still halfway through the group stretches they’d never been told to stop.
Squire blinked up at him. “Coach… we’re trying. But every time we do something good, Big Joe whistles at us. I got ejected last quarter for ‘unsanctioned hustle.’”
Another agent nodded. “I think I got penalized for catching the ball.”
Redd looked at them. These were good kids. Hard workers. Future agents of the Dominion. They deserved more than this circus.
He took off his hat.
“Team,” he said solemnly, “I have made a decision. I am going to abandon the sacred fundamentals of football.”
Gasps.
Squire dropped his water bottle.
“I know, I know,” Redd said quickly, hands raised. “It’s a betrayal of everything I stand for. But this is no ordinary battlefield. This is a field of nonsense. And it’s time we adapted.”
He squared his shoulders. Lightning cracked overhead — for dramatic effect, or possibly it was just the blimp flying over the stadium. “From now until the final whistle… we play like Agent Soash.”
The team stared.
“You mean… selfie passes?” one whispered.
“Victory dances before the snap?” asked another.
Redd nodded. “Yes. And jazz hands. Possibly sparkles. We will play this ludicrous parody of football with such coordinated showmanship — such unshakable patriotic pizzazz — that the game itself will blink first.”
Squire raised a trembling hand. “Coach… permission to wear a feather boa?”
“Granted.”
Redd marched up and down the field, coaching camera poses between backward drills. A line of junior agents practised high-kicks into the end zone with military precision. One poor soul kept trying to dab but kept defaulting to a salute — which Redd insisted was “still patriotically fabulous.”
Squire led a call-and-response chant while somersaulting through hula hoops:
“Two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar—
Everyone flash your teeth for the jumbo tron caller!”
Redd didn’t lead from the sidelines. No, sir. He was in the dirt with them, moon walking awkwardly across the 20-yard line while explaining that “swagger, if properly executed, could be a tactical advantage.”
And then play of the second half began.
Team Redd returned to the field with glitter under their eyes and streamers on their sleeves, marching in synchronized formation like jazz gladiators preparing for war.
The whistle blew.
First play: a perfect spiral — followed by a midair pose, thumbs up, chin nobly tilted.
Big Joe blinked. He hrrnked, adjusted his floaties… and raised both hooves.
“Touchdown awarded to Soash’s team! Bonus points for smiling!”
The crowd cheered.
Redd’s eyes widened. For the first time all day, Team Redd had them.
They lined up again — now with ribbon twirls.
One agent pirouetted into a shovel pass.
Another struck a ballet pose mid-handoff.
For a glorious minute and thirty-seven seconds, the field became a symphony of sweat, sparkle, and controlled absurdity.
But then—
Squire dropped the baton he was meant to twirl post-catch.
Flag on the play.
Two agents attempted a cartwheel handshake.
They collided mid-spin.
Flag.
One forgot to wink during a team pose.
Double penalty.
Whistle. Flag. Disappointed moose noises.
The rhythm unravelled.
Across the field, Soash’s team continued to do nothing — and do it with flair.
They struck slow-motion poses.
They mimed victory.
One kid sneezed stylishly and was awarded five points for “visually dynamic exhalation.”
The scoreboard did not lie:
Soash’s Team: 114
Redd’s Team: 2
(The original 3 had been adjusted for “overconfidence” during a cartwheel attempt.)
Redd stood at midfield. He watched the chaos unfold — arms crossed, face unreadable. His players returned to him, hopeful, panting, still faintly glittered. He lowered his whistle slowly.
“Well,” he said at last, “that was… not a winning strategy.”
Squire patted his shoulder. “It was still kinda fun, sir.”
If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.
Redd exhaled. “…Yes. Fun like a marching band tumbling down an escalator. No one dies, but you don’t ask to see it again.”
Above them, high on the jumbo tron, the camera caught Big Joe mid-spin, blowing his whistle at his own reflection in the glass. He wore sunglasses now. He was hrrnking to the rhythm of his own internal jazz.
Sandy Beeches had stopped sitting. Her camping chair lay tipped over behind her, abandoned like a bad decision. She stood with arms folded so tightly across her chest, it looked like she was trying to keep her soul from leaking out her sleeves.
She stared at the scoreboard.
Then the field.
Then Soash.
“You don’t even try to coach,” she said, as two of Soash’s players received a ten-point bonus for a double high-five in matching sunglasses.
Soash didn’t answer right away. He was misting his face with bottled water, slowly rotating so the sunlight caught the sheen just right. When he did speak, it was with the calm confidence of a man who had never followed a rule — and had never once been punished for it.
“I don’t coach, Sandra. I curate.”
Sandy opened her mouth. Closed it. Rubbed her temples with a groan that sounded like it had been aging in a barrel since breakfast.
Redd knelt in the grass like a general on the edge of a hopeless battlefield. His team clustered around him, damp, glitter-smeared, shoulders sagging.
He pulled a crumpled handkerchief from his pocket, patted his brow, and stood.
“That’s it,” he said with quiet resolve. “We held the line. We tried every formation in the Book of Heroic Tactics — and a few from the back of a cereal box. But this… this isn’t a game anymore.”
Squire looked up. “What is it then?”
Redd placed a hand over his heart. “It’s a pageant, lad. A soulless, overly-sponsored pageant in which we are not merely outnumbered… but out-flamboyanced. And the moose won’t let us pick up the ball.”
From behind them, Big Joe blew his whistle.
A banner unfurled from the press box above:
“Official OGRE Field Personality of the Quarter: BIG JOE”
Confetti rained down. One of Redd’s players sneezed.
Joe mooed and wrote “Penalty” on his chalkboard.
Sandy walked up beside Redd, handed him a lukewarm hot chocolate without a word, and stood next to him in silence.
Together, they watched Soash’s team line up — not for a play, but for a choreographed slow wave to the crowd, backs to the game, basking in applause like sunflowers in a spotlight.
“I’ve seen train wrecks,” Sandy muttered, sipping her cocoa, “but at least they follow a track.”
Redd nodded. “Hmm. I suspect this track was made of pudding from the start.”
Just as another glitter cannon misfired — sending the mascot screaming into a popcorn stand — a new sound shattered the air. Not a whistle. Not a horn.
A corporate chime. Cold. Final. The kind of sound that made interns weep and quarterly reports burst into flames.
It was the three-minute warning.
The players trudged to their benches — some to plan, others to reapply their stage makeup for the grand finale.
And then came the voice. Crisp. Thunderous. Amplified from the heavens:
“STOP THIS MADNESS AT ONCE.”
Everything froze.
The players. The crowd. Even Big Joe paused mid-hrrnk, one hoof hovering over the suspiciously sticky VORTEXADE cooler.
And onto the field marched Compacte.
The elusive owner of OGRE. Tall. Angular. Bleak as an end-of-quarter report. Wrapped in a fur-lined trench coat worth more than the stadium itself — and carrying all the charisma of a broken photocopier that somehow still demands a promotion.
At his side waddled Messup, Thorne’s corporate lackey, inexplicably dressed like a 1940s dog catcher and already regretting most of his life.
Compacte surveyed the field like a disappointed science teacher at a school talent show.
“Thorne,” he said, voice like a blade across ice. “What. Is. This.”
Thorne — now reclined on the sidelines in an executive lawn chair, snow cone in one hand, the OGRE CUP trophy in the other — bolted upright.
“Sir! You’re just in time for the finale! We were about to unveil the Interpretive Safety Dance of the Provinces! Wait’ll you see what we did with Nunavut—”
“This is not what I wanted, Thorne,” Compacte interrupted. “You have one chance to explain. Otherwise, Messup is my new COO.”
There was a long, brittle pause.
“…You asked for football, sir,” Thorne said slowly. “I thought I gave you the most profitable football event in Canadian history.”
Compacte turned, slowly, through steel-rimmed spectacles.
“Are you dense, Thorne? I meant football. That plastic thing. The one people throw to cute little dogs who catch it in their teeth. I know what it is because I was watching it with Messup when I brilliantly thought, ‘I should own this sport.’”
Thorne blinked. “You… meant Frisbee?”
Messup smacked his forehead. “That’s right! Frisbee! I told you, sir — it wasn’t football. Sorry.”
“That’s all right, my little troll-like friend,” he said gently. “You at least knew what I wanted. It’s Thorne who failed to tell the difference between a sport of kings and a glow stick parade.”
Thorne sighed. “Of course, sir. I shall begin studying how to read your mind with increased urgency.”
“As you should. Now shut this down. Sell it. Burn it. Bury it in Saskatchewan.”
He turned to Messup. “Go fetch me a Frisbee.”
Messup straightened. “Should I act like a smelly, dumb dog while I do it?”
“Can you?”
Messup grinned like a golden retriever with a promotion. “Oh, I can.”
Compacte raised one gloved hand, snapping his fingers once. From somewhere deep in the shadows, a man in a cape appeared, holding a golden megaphone that shimmered beneath the floodlights.
Compacte nodded toward the field.
The man spoke into the megaphone with operatic finality:
“Effective immediately, by executive order of Compacte the Overseeing — the Dominion Cup is cancelled.”
The crowd gasped.
Squire dropped his pom-poms.
Sandy actually smiled.
The crowd began to scatter.
Confetti drifted like tired snow, clinging to the goalposts and the egos it couldn’t quite bury.
The halftime stage lights sputtered, then went dark.
One lone kazoo wheezed its last note.
Under the flickering marquee that still read “DOMINION CUP — MAYBE REAL?”, the Monarch agents lingered near a battered hot dog cart that had somehow survived both the halftime show and a falling mechanical bull.
Redd sat on a bench, his cleats off, sipping something orange from a dented bottle labelled Syrup-Ade. He looked exhausted. A man who had led a platoon into absurdity and returned only slightly stickier than before.
Squire sat beside him, mustard on his jersey, clutching a foam finger like a flag of surrender.
“You think they’ll let us play a real game next year?” he asked.
Redd considered it. “I’d settle for a real ref.”
Big Joe passed behind them, dragging a plastic kiddie pool labelled OFFICIAL REVIEW TUB, his floaties squeaking as he walked.
He paused, hrrnked softly, and nodded to them with the solemn dignity of a creature who believed, against all odds, he’d done his duty.
Redd raised his bottle. “To sportsmanship,” he said.
Soash strolled past, twirling a pennant like a cane. “Well, I think we all learned something today: never trust a moose with whistle authority... and always dress for brunch, just in case.”
Big Joe hrrnked once more — then wandered off into the parking lot, following a Frisbee that no one had thrown.