The second Saturday of May, at a small, obscure restaurant in a medium-size Southern town, there will be a gathering of 50-something men and women to celebrate an event that was a singular event in their lives. Some will be merely broken shells of their youthful vigor and strength. Some will have held up slightly better over the 4 decades that have elapsed since their days of glory. All will have slightly less hair, perhaps a few less teeth, be an inch or two shorter and more than a few inches wider. Most will have had tragedy visit their lives since those halcyon days of youth. Wrinkles will mark the hands of time. The erosive qualities of inexorable time has that effect on the shells that house our hearts and souls.

But, when these men and women first see the faces from their youth, something miraculous will take place. As if in a time machine, their eyes and brains will trick their perceptions of those in attendance. Whisked back to 1968 in the blink of an eye, we will all look - more or less - to those from our past as, to borrow from a Redford movie, "the way we were." Wrinkles will magically fill, blemishes will fade, we will appear just a little taller and much straighter. For the few minutes that these particular festivities will last, we will all - at least in the "eye of the beholders" - be young again. Just as parents always see - in their mind’s eye - their children as they were as youths, old friends, reunited, happily suffer the same distortion of the senses.

I have no doubt that it will be a happy event. Those from our younger days do not know (nor need to know) all the failures, tragedies and pratfalls we have agonized through since we last met. All our slates, which mark the many foibles of our lives in painful detail and hang like stones about our necks, will be, for a brief time, wiped clean. We will, miraculously, be washed of 40 years of life’s mud, tears and blood to a pristine shine. It will be one of those extremely rare moments when time stops its inexorable march forward and whirs backward, if only temporarily, to a happier, more innocent time in all our lives.

This particular magical gathering (surely not unlike many others occurring all around the nation every year and in every season) will celebrate the first and, still, only undefeated football season in our high school’s history. We were not a "national power" nor were we a large school. As I recall, we only had a senior class of 150 or so. We played a local schedule; out-of-state "mega-games were only to come decades in the future, in the time of sports networks and well-heeled football boosters. Having refuted any claim for fame, we did defeat all comers. And that, in those times when "parity" of high schools was not spoken of but really existed, was no small accomplishment. In those days of "you go to school where you live" that, happily, predates the aggressive recruiting of high school athletes to "elite programs" with job offers to parents with moving costs provided, we were kids who grew up together and lived in close proximity of the school and each other. That is the way things were when money mattered less than local pride.

I remember that year and that team, even now, for many reasons, all swirling around in my mind in a kind of mystical, ethereal dance. It was a pivotal year in the history of America. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered in April, 1969; Bobby Kennedy was assassinated later that same summer. Student protests were rampaging across the campuses of Berkeley and other colleges. Communist North Korean seized the U.S.S. Pueblo, precipitating a world crisis; the Viet Nam "conflict" became a widely recognized as an exercise in futility as the Communist North initiated the "Tet Offensive". The My Lai Massacre darkened the prospects for "peace with honor." Richard Nixon was elected President of the United States when the incumbent, Lyndon Johnson, threw in the towel and gave up on securing world (or even domestic) peace. Tommie Smith and John Carlos gave a black gloved protest salute at the Summer Olympics in Mexico City. It was not a time of peace and love in our country.

But, it was a time in my little world when a father and a son bonded, as so many do, over athletic competition. My dad and I had always had a rather contentious relationship. He was a working man who was raising a petulant son while beginning a new life with his second wife. He was often exhausted and frequently (and understandably) irritable. We both knew we loved each other but, as fathers and sons of the time were apt to do, kept it pretty well below the surface. When football season rolled around and it looked as if I would be a starting lineman, something wonderful happened: my dad dropped his guard, if just a little, and started to show a genuine interest in me and my team. We - at least I - marked this as a real turning point in our relationship. We miraculously became "father and son" for, at least to my eyes, the first time in our lives. Since that year and against the tides of time, we have remained so. My dad is my hero and, as much as a father and son can be, my best friend. If there was absolutely nothing else to come about that year, the blossoming of a son’s relationship with a emotionally distant father would have been an entirely sufficient reason to make 1968 worth remembering.

And then there were the 1968 Fairfield High School Tigers and the football team. We had integrated with the black Fairfield Industrial High School just the year before. After the "shakeout" year of 1967, the new students were fully prepared to begin contributing to all aspects of their new school’s activities. And contribute they surely did. Our choirs, our band, our academics and our athletics were all enriched by the new black students who were fully dedicated to not just be students at FHS but to make the school their school. And they succeeded in every possible way.

Once the football season commenced, something new and surprising was in the air. The combination of a superb coaching staff, a student body and band that was convinced the football team was special and a group of fuzzy-faced teenagers who believed in each other caused miracles to start happening. We suddenly had a team that could excel in all aspects of the game of football: speed, instincts, a refreshingly unselfish mentality and that elusive ingredient, confidence in ourselves, mixed in the cauldron of circumstance. The blend produced a rare chemistry among the children-who-would-become-men. We started winning.

And, with the winning, came a crescendo of excitement that I have never experienced since. It was the closest thing to mythical Camelot that a 18 year old pseudo-jock could possibly experience. We - meaning the whole high school - didn’t think we were going to win; we knew we were going to win. Even playing stronger teams from larger high schools, we never doubted each other. We were convinced that - somehow, someway - we would handle whatever our opponents would throw at us. If our quarterback wouldn’t be the hero, our running back, wide-receivers or our defense would come through. If we got behind in the score (which wasn’t often), no one started blaming the other players, kicking over water coolers or screaming that time was running out and someone had to "make a play!" We were a quiet group, everyone silenced by an underlying sense of destiny and confidence. We knew, at the right time, someone would step up. And, wonder of wonders, for nine straight games, someone always did.

As I fondly look back on one of the highlights of a life with lots of ups and downs, I still cannot help but smile. When I was young, strong and seemingly immune to hurts and loss, I was oblivious of what life can, tragically, do to all of us. Over the years, I would lose many things so very precious to me and fail more times than I care to count. But, in 1968, those inevitabilities were all in the unseen future, waiting like vipers in tall grass, unseen by any who glanced their way. And few of us even bothered to glance; we were having too much fun.

All I knew (or cared about) then was that I had a father that was proud of me, teammates that pushed me to do what I would have thought beyond my capabilities and a school that cheered for me (well, at least for the team) every Friday night. Life was good. Surely, if I could do the unlikely on the gridiron I could make it through whatever life could throw my way.

As the English poet, Thomas Gray wrote: "Where ignorance is bliss, / ‘Tis folly to be wise!" It was, unknowingly, the watchword of our youth. Sadly, life ripped back the curtain and, soon enough, showed us the harshness of reality. But, despite the "thousand natural shocks the flesh is ‘ere to", time could never erase the memory of the grand time we had.

And that, dear reader, was the joy of youth.