#but I find it supremely funny that the stakes of the season were already insane BEFORE Neil pissed off the mafia

[constelationprize]

A background detail in the books that facinates me is that the Foxes were on the verge of being dismantled. And by detail I mean that it's a fact so widely known that we hear about it from chapter 1, just as passive knowledge Neil has before even dreaming of playing with them.

It ends up staying fairly background because Neil has... Bigger worries, but it is very much present for the whole series. There are plenty of descriptions of how Palmetto thought the Foxes would breathe life into the town; How Wymack lives practically alone in one of the apartment complexes built out of the expectation.

For four years, the Foxes placed dead last, and if they do it again, they ARE getting demoted from Class I. Of the original team, there was only Seth left. And if you do the math, that means that people were leaving up until the semester before TFC begins, because there are nine players including Kevin, who was an assistant coach, and Neil is replacing another recruit. Seth's death brings them down to nine again, and the ERC's response to that is to start a discussion on whether the minimum number of players should go up to 12. If it weren't for the intervetion of Coach Rhemann, they would have gotten disqualified anyway when Andrew went to Easthaven. PSU was against signing the girls, and both the university and the ERC fought back against making Dan captain.

They are not only fighting for their lives out here, they are straight up losing.

That puts a lot of things into perspective, I think. For one, I think it really explains a lot about Kevin's relationship to the Foxes. Like, imagine knowing your second – your last – chance at a life is under threat, and out of nowhere, the best player in your league offers to help you. And then he does it by saying all the effort you've made up until now was useless, that all your fighting wasn't enough. I'd resent him too.

It also says very interesting things both about who Wymack is as a person and exactly how big of a deal he must have been as a player, that he keeps facing these incredible odds and getting just one more chance. And even when he knows he's running out of strings to pull, he keeps on, because "one more chance" is what his team is supposed to be about anyway.

And then they turn around and not only break their own records by making past the first rounds, they go all the way up and dethrone the undefeated champion of their league for first place. It's no wonder not even they believed they could do it.