"Sometimes, I think, if you stand on the sidelines long enough, you're bound to hear just about everything - especially if you talk about old wounds.

One time, while standing on the sideline watching a game, a player said to me, "My friend was killed in a car crash a couple of years ago. I was in the car with him. He'd had a little too much to drink but he wasn't drunk. No... he wasn't drunk. It was a freak thing, you know? He was my best friend."

"That's upsetting," I said.

He shook his head, pursed his lips, pinched his cheeks in towards his mouth. "Nah... But you should have seen my face. I went through the windshield. They had to do re-constructive surgery. But hey, I'm all healed up now. Besides I don't believe in thinking about those kinds of things. What's done is done, you know? It's in the past. I don't have any feelings about it anymore."

In front of us two players collided and smacked into the frost hardened earth. The ball dropped to the ground and bounced, almost in slow motion, until someone ran by and picked it up. The two players on the ground disentangled and stood up. There was blood on one of the player's cheeks, as if his skin was a curtain, torn by a knife.

"I don't have any feelings about it at all."

Nope. None at all.

It's rugby as metaphor.

I guess you could say I read a lot into the game. But then this isn't just an ordinary game - at least not for me. It's a game where a strange kind of insane sanity prevails. And I think there are a lot of us who search for a little sanity in this world - a little reprieve from the wounds, both the old and festering and the new and bleeding. Standing on that sideline I've heard countless players, friends and teammates, tell me versions of one simple truth they've learned - when you're on the pitch nothing else matters but the game.

For eighty minutes the world is enclosed in an imaginary rectangle, bordered by white paint and chalk dust - borders as real as emotional cement walls. So we hit and get hit, run and score, breathe in air that's laced with the sweet taste of the coming rain and shout to the heavens with our arms raised into the air when we're victorious - stare at the ground and exhale exhaustion and numbness when we face defeat.

On the rugby pitch the world shrinks down to a manageable size, away from lost loves, terminal illness, aging parents, domestic arguments, loneliness and the pressures of work. And the rules of life within the chalk lines are somehow - different. For example: No matter how many times you get hit you can still come back for more; Usually you heal by the next Saturday; On the pitch, experience counts for something; In the long run the referees are fair, the laws are followed, and the better team that day usually wins; You don't have to stop playing when you're over 35; Pain is familiar but death is almost nonexistent; Anyone can win for 80 minutes at a time; You're allowed to scream, to yell, to thump your chest - to feel.

My brother was killed eight years ago in New York City. He was mentally ill - in and out of hospitals for years. I started playing rugby shortly after he was first hospitalized, over twelve years ago. It's amazing how that lines up for me. It's a dark time and place for me to visit - a place I don't like to go too often - one most of us anaesthetize, amputate and cauterize or at least we think we do. Into the mouth of rugby madness we go - down down to Goblin town.

I can still hear that player on the sideline talking to me.

"I don't have any feelings about it at all."

Sure.

That's what I was going to say.

The End