The big crowd jostled slowly out of the gate and it seemed to Scott that for people who had been so wildly desirous of winning, they were very silent about it when it was accomplished.
“That’s what I call a good game,” Scott said.
“That’s what _I_ call a rotten game,” Johnson retorted. “They ought to have beaten Lawrence thirty to nothing, instead of that they barely succeeded in making seven, and were nearly scored against three or four times.”
“What has that got to do with it?” Scott argued. “It would have been just as good a game if we had not won it at all. The good playing is what you want to see, no matter who does it.”
“Do you mean to say that you would enjoy seeing a good play if the other people made it and it counted against you?”
“Certainly,” Scott answered stoutly. “I enjoyed seeing that quarterback make that tackle though it knocked us out of a touchdown. It would not have been nearly so pretty if he had missed it.”
“That’s one of your Eastern ideas of sport,” Johnson jeered contemptuously. “You can watch the pretty plays the other people make; they look better to me when our own team makes them.”
“If that game had been at home,” Scott continued, “every good play those Lawrence people made would have been cheered the same as our own.”
“Do you call that being loyal to your team?” Johnson asked.
“Certainly. It’s simply giving the other fellow credit for what he does. There is no team loyalty in pretending the fellows they beat are no good, and still less in saying that the team that defeated them was no good.”
That seemed to put the question up to Johnson in a new light. He pondered over it for a minute and then looked up cheerfully.
“I’ll tell you what it is, Scotty. We play to win and let the other fellow look after his credit, but there’s some sense in that last. Can you really see the beauty of the play that goes against you?”
“Well,” Johnson laughed, “wait till I see you praising some fellow’s skill in blacking your eye in some boxing bout. Then I’ll believe you. Come on, let’s walk home. We’ll have plenty of time before supper.”
There was a little talk at the supper table of the football game, most of the men taking the same view as Johnson, that it was a pretty poor exhibition because Lawrence had not been completely overwhelmed, but most of the time was taken up with a discussion of the coming campfire. The upper classmen hinted mysteriously of the sacred rites that had been prepared for the new members.