“Beautiful tackle?” Johnson raged. “I wish he had broken his neck.” This last remark must not be taken to represent the attitude of the majority of the crowd, but it fairly represented Johnson’s attitude in everything but his own actions.
The setback, however, was only temporary. The big team gathered itself together, and carried the ball over for a touchdown. Goal was kicked just three minutes before time was called, and the game ended with a score of seven to nothing in favor of Minnesota.
The big crowd jostled slowly out of the gate and it seemed to Scott that for people who had been so wildly desirous of winning, they were very silent about it when it was accomplished.
“That’s what I call a good game,” Scott said.
“That’s what I call a rotten game,” Johnson retorted. “They ought to have beaten Lawrence thirty to nothing, instead of that they barely succeeded in making seven, and were nearly scored against three or four times.”
“What has that got to do with it?” Scott argued. “It would have been just as good a game if we had not won it at all. The good playing is what you want to see, no matter who does it.”
“Do you mean to say that you would enjoy seeing a good play if the other people made it and it counted against you?”
“Certainly,” Scott answered stoutly. “I enjoyed seeing that quarterback make that tackle though it knocked us out of a touchdown. It would not have been nearly so pretty if he had missed it.”
“That’s one of your Eastern ideas of sport,” Johnson jeered contemptuously. “You can watch the pretty plays the other people make; they look better to me when our own team makes them.”
“If that game had been at home,” Scott continued, “every good play those Lawrence people made would have been cheered the same as our own.”