You ever feel like you're living in a town that's just a corpse waiting for a funeral? That’s what it’s like here since the mill folded. You drive down Main Street and it’s just plywood and ghosts. The only thing that still has a pulse is the high school gym on a Friday night. It’s pathetic, really. You see these grown men, guys I went to school with before I did my three tours, and they’re looking at these seventeen-year-old kids like they’re the Second Coming. It’s a lot of weight to put on a kid who still has acne, but in a place with zero industrial output, I guess hope is the only commodity left. Then there’s Jace. He’s the point guard, the kind of kid who moves like water—fluid, fast, completely effortless. He’s the reason the scouts are actually showing up in this zip code. Last Tuesday, I caught him behind the equipment shed after practice. It wasn’t even subtle. He was passing a flask with two other kids, laughing like he was untouchable. In the service, that’s an Article 15, no questions asked. You break the regs, you face the music. That’s how I was wired. You maintain the standard because the standard is what keeps people alive when things go fubar. But standing there in the cold, smelling that sharp, medicinal sting of cheap rotgut, I didn't feel the anger I should have. You’d think I’d be incensed, right? This kid is disrespecting the game, the team, the whole town. But I just looked at him and felt this overwhelming sense of... nothing. Just a total vacuum where the discipline used to be. I told the other two to get lost and I just stood there with Jace. He looked terrified for about five seconds, then he saw my face and he knew. He knew I wasn’t going to do a damn thing. You start to realize that "integrity" is a luxury for people who aren't starving for a win. If I report him, he’s out for the championship. If he’s out, we lose. If we lose, the one flicker of light in this gray, miserable hole of a county goes out for good. My principal, a guy who’s never seen anything more violent than a papercut, basically told me as much without saying it. He talked about "community morale" and "the bigger picture." A lot of high-flown words for "look the other way or we’re all screwed." So I took the flask. I didn't even lecture him. I just put it in my pocket and told him to get to the layup lines. Watching him run out there, hearing the sneakers squeak on the hardwood, you get this weird, detached feeling. Like you're watching a movie you’ve already seen. I know he’s going to keep doing it. I know I’ve basically given him a license to be a prick because he’s got a jumper. But when you’ve spent years watching real structures collapse, a high school code of conduct feels like a joke. It’s just ink on a page... totally meaningless. People in the grocery store stop me now. They want to talk about the "momentum." They shake my hand with these rough, calloused palms and thank me for "turning things around." It’s an absolute farce. I’m not a leader; I’m a collaborator in a lie. But you see the way their faces light up when they talk about the trophy, and you realize they need this lie more than they need the truth. They need to feel like they’re part of something that isn't decaying. Who am I to take that away just to satisfy some leftover sense of military protocol? Sometimes you catch yourself looking in the mirror and wondering where the guy who cared about the rules went. He’s probably buried somewhere in a ditch outside Kandahar. Now I’m just this guy in a windbreaker, managing a bunch of kids who think they’re kings because they can shoot a ball through a hoop. Jace looks at me in practice now with this smirk. It’s a subtle thing, but it’s there. He knows he owns me.