One gets cabin fever. It was easy to be stricken by that affliction during last week’s frigid days of winter.

Outside of the Optic, stalactites and stalagmites grew to about 12 feet. I craved air and sunshine, which I received with a quick walk around nearby Lincoln Park.

I had just started my brisk walk when a touch-football game broke out. I saw a group of four — three men and a woman — playing as if they meant it. I needed to take in all that action. The group, probably in their 30s, were using a softball instead of a football, but from what I could determine, they were following football rules, Vegas style.

The group’s sloshing around brought me back to my youth, when going beyond touch football and having kids knock one another down was the rule, not the exception. I wondered whether this two-on-two game was inspired by some very recent Facebook clips showing the mayor of a big city urging people not to be foolish. The clip showed young men leaping out of their balconies, flipping and landing head-first into deep snow that fell in places like Boston.

Were these derrring-do feats the inspiration for the mini-football game at Lincoln Park? I call it mini because when I returned for my second Lincoln Park constitutional, the gridders were gone, making it a mini-duration game.

This sighting impressed me because . . . because it’s rare. More common is the sight of young folks pecking and poking away at an i-Phone. Nowadays we don’t see many kids spontaneously creating a game that involves running, throwing, catching, blocking, tackling. No, more commonly it’s slow-moving kids not daring to get their heart rates up.

Later, I walked to the pie-shaped spot at Grand, Third Street and Columbia, a wedge taken over by the Department of Workforce Solutions. That used to be our turf back in the ‘50s and ‘60s.
What’s changed? Rain or shine, an army of neighborhood boys (and a few girls) made the first-mentioned park our stadium. We played hard, tackled hard, got our noses bloodied, and came back for more. I still remember the words of Rafael Apodaca, a neighbor, who turned in an NFL-type tackle against me.

Using Spanglish, Rafael said, “Oooh, que splash!” People applauded, even members of my own team. They marveled at the ease of the tackle, done by Rafael’s barely tapping my foot and making it trip the other. After the kersplash, I too congratulated him — but that might have been only because Rafael had helped me find my glasses.

For several summers of our youth, we played tough. The score didn’t really matter, and the victors were usually those who remained at the park the longest. We didn’t have fancy things like extra points or field goals — just touchdowns. And we didn’t have uniforms; street clothes and school shoes sufficed. We selected the teams by having the captains alternate sides, and if anyone joined us late, he played with the side with fewer players.

At the time, we who knew only street football were generally unaware of the well-trained boys who played for the nearby Castle Junior High Longhorns. They had real plays, far more sophisticated than our repetitious “run for a pass” scheme. We needed to vet the Castle crowd: Are you a Longhorn? If you are, one has to play on our side.

In no particular order, I remember boys like Agapito Quintana, Charles Archuleta, Joseph Valerio and Onofre Gallegos coming from a few blocks north to join us. The 800 block usually included Apodaca brothers Jimmy and Clyde, with the frequent addition of their sisters, Elvira and Frances.

And from the Railroad barrio, we came in droves: Leroy and Tony Lucero, Paul Lopez, Rafael and Abran Apodaca, Paul Herrera, Fred Cordova, Joe Chavez, Waldron Romero, Tony Martinez, Don Archuleta, Leo Vigil, Franklin and Joe Gallegos, Junior Scott, Gilbert Anaya, Fred Gallegos and Pete Quintana.

I owned a football which was very much in use. It’s interesting that 60 years ago, we predated the practice of Bill Belichick, current coach of the world champion New England Patriots. Yes, we too had under-inflated footballs, which are easier to throw, catch and run with. However, in our case, we didn’t flatten the balls for any nefarious Belichick-type purposes. The flimsy and flabby under-inflated footballs felt fine to us and came about because repairing a slow leak was difficult.

In the heat of competition, some let their tempers flare. One game ended in a scuffle when a tackler became a bit too aggressive. He resented the fact that Paul Lopez, a ball carrier, would toss the pigskin up in the air, then catch it and call it “a pass to myself,” to avoid being tackled. A slight bending of the rules?

Whenever a fight brewed, the rest of us jumped in to break them up. A couple of times when opponents got too feisty, our captain made us all agree that the combatants would need to play on the same side. And they implemented a rule that anyone who threw a punch would be ejected.

I liked the rules, which gave consistency to the game. Then, before games, we’d go up to each player and say “No enojings.” That’s not really a language, but a blending of the regular participial ending of English words, “ings” and part of the Spanish verb “enojar,” which means to become angry.

We passed that “no enojings” pledge around and lived by it.

And years later, when some of us engaged in a friendly game of kick-over, we recalled and invoked the “no enojings” dictum.