Big Shot | ✓

01 | spring tide

A spring tide is when the Moon is either new or full, and the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth are perfectly aligned. When this happens, their collective gravitational pull on all the bodies of water on Earth is strengthened.

At Clemson University, the football spring game this year had a similar sentiment. Although, that wasn't normally the vibe of the yearly spring game, despite the fact that it regularly would sell out all 40,000 tickets that the school made available for it. That part wasn't abnormal, it was just college football in the South.

But this year, the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth were perfectly aligned, because to Clemson, Reid Donahue was the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth all at once, and the gravitational pull his return to football had on this entire campus was simply otherworldly.

The spring game itself was rarely important to anyone outside of the football program, since it was just an intersquad and allowed the offense and the defense to practice the closest thing they could to in-game scenarios before the season started in the fall. It gave all of us in the sports media department a chance to practice what we would do in-game, too. I'd made new Instagram graphics for the season and was still testing out the Nikon I'd treated myself to for Christmas.

But when Reid took the field for the first time in almost two years, it felt like I'd been thrust right into a jet engine, surrounded by blaring sound and hot air. When he completed his first pass - nothing more than a simple checkdown to our star running back Drake Brooks - we may as well have broken the sound barrier. People didn't cheer that loud at some regular season home games.

"It's titanium," Kayla told me at the beginning of the game. "Specially designed just for him."

She gestured to the large brace Reid wore on his right leg, glinting brightly in the sunlight as if it were a crown bestowed upon him and his divine right to rule and not medical equipment intended to keep the structure of his knee intact.

I didn't know the gory details of Reid's injury since I hadn't been in attendance for the game he got hurt back during our sophomore year, and it had become kind of weird to talk about on campus, in the way that it feels weird to talk about a god as if he were a regular person.

I could have looked it up, but the very thought of someone's leg getting snapped in half made me squeamish.

All I knew was that after the injury, Reid had become a mystery seemingly overnight. Nothing more than a shadow you could catch (if you were lucky) darting in between the street lights on campus going to his night classes. Within a year, the mystery became a legend, and the legend became a myth. There were whispers in the corners of the football facilities that he'd never play again, but that was just a rumor. Some people even said they saw his foot facing in the wrong direction when he got hurt. That was an even worse rumor.

When word had come out last month that Reid was returning to football, the rumor mill caught fire and exploded. Suddenly the man, the myth, the legend had been deified again. If I'd learned anything from worlds like Game of Thrones, you couldn't take away someone's divine right to rule that easily.

"Touchdown, Reid Donahue!"

The band kicked up into the standard touchdown tune, the sound lifting my gaze back to the field. As I found the far end zone, I saw Reid - infamously dubbed "The Archer" for his bow and arrow firing touchdown celebration - doing exactly that. Back to normal, as if nothing had changed. The echoing of the crowd as it spilled down onto the field made my ears ring.

They took Reid out of the game after that second score, 1 - to not overexert himself in his first snaps back and 2 - to test out the other pieces of the offense, as was the normal protocol for the spring game. Reid returned to the bench to jostling and jubilation from both the team and the crowd. I should have been accustomed to all the yelling and cheering by now, but it was starting to give me a headache.