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The men sitting in the polished pews at St. Clare's were teachers and firemen and politicians and stock brokers with wives and kids and jobs to get back to, and mortgages to pay. One of Sal's guys piloted the plane that helped rescue Gemini 8 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott after an emergency splashdown in the western Pacific, three years before Armstrong walked on the moon. Another played in the Super Bowl. A few were millionaires. A lot of them were the first in their families to go to college.

But in this setting, in the company of men they played and fought and laughed and cried with, when they were all just boys — stripped naked five afternoons a week and again on Saturday, because on those days there was no place to hide who you were, and no way to fake it — they were transported back to a time when it didn't matter if they were rich or poor, or if their parents belonged to the Country Club or they just got off the boat from the Old Country.

A part of each of them was 17 again, sitting in some unheated locker room with the old fears rising in the pit of his stomach, listening to the whooping and hollering coming from down the hall, and hoping he'd find the calm, and the courage … again … to do whatever had to be done without screwing things up for everybody else, and that he wouldn't do anything to disappoint the man in the coat and tie and the gray fedora.”