Horace Mann's 1957 Championship Jacket Came Back Spotless

I have a sweatshirt from my own high school's 1994 basketball season that is in mint condition for the same reason, and I have never once had the nerve to say so out loud.

His route to the jacket ran through his mother. He broke a finger at eleven, and she forbade him to play anything like football that could injure him again. So, he recalled, he became a cheerleader. By the school's account, of all the cheerleaders Horace Mann had back then, he cheered with the most intensity.

Then the team got good. It got better each year, and by 1957 it was so good, he said, that after the second game he couldn't take just watching and cheering any more. He asked the coach to put him in. The coach agreed. So, crucially, did his mother.

The 1958 Mannikin, the yearbook, filed the official version. It reported that he had worked himself into such a dither leading cheers that he "took his own advice" and joined the ever-victorious team as a senior.

Took his own advice. Somewhere there is a cheerleader in every family. In ours it's me, at the middle one's JV soccer games, shouting instructions nobody asked for from behind a rope. Nobody has ever suggested I take my own advice. The coach has suggested I move further down the rope.

At the 2012 visit, the coaches told Rosenblatt about the biggest difference since his day: new helmets designed to prevent concussions, and new concussion policies for every athlete. The school's own write-up ends with one line: "Mrs. Rosenblatt would have been proud."

The jacket went into a showcase outside the library, for students to see, and was then to go on permanent display in the gym.

So there it is, a championship jacket preserved behind glass in exactly the condition it was issued in, because the man who earned it spent most of the season standing next to it. My sweatshirt is in a drawer. I'm going to offer it to my old school. I'll tell them I didn't play very much. They'll tell me they know.