The further you get from professional sports, the better the competition.

It’s getting impossible to get very far from professional sports, however. I don’t know of any sport at any level where the participants — or more likely, their parents — don’t have “going pro” in the back of their minds. T-ball players are coached to come in with their sharpened cleats up. Even “amateurs” aren’t anything of the sort. There’s as much money in a gold medal as there is in the average NFL contract, if you play your cards right. And everyone’s playing cards.

So, I figure every single person who caught a lateral on this play has a touchdown dance and a highlight reel and a pro career in the back, if not the front, of his mind. No one understands the odds. But as Han Solo says, never tell me the odds. They’re not calculating the odds of the play working. They’re calculating the odds of the play resulting in dough down the line. What are the actual odds of that? According to Pro Football Reference, exactly four people have attended Trinity University and then gone on to play in the NFL. Four. In half a century, four.

I don’t care why they did it. I don’t care if they did it for the wrong reasons. They did it, and it was glorious.