The Deregtory

By Kevin De Regt | 10/12/10 12:42am

Stephanie Han / The Dartmouth Senior Staff

Wel­come back for an­other week of hard-hit­ting Dart­mouth foot­ball analy­sis! Be­fore we start I need to clear up one lo­gis­ti­cal issue — con­trary to what the Dart­mouth Foot­ball Pro­nun­ci­a­tion Guide may lead you to be­lieve, my last name is pro­nounced de-RECT, and in my mind “Dereg­tory” has al­ways been pro­nounced like “di­rec­tory.” It’s like a lit­tle play on words. So to the next per­son who asks me about the “Deret­tory,” “Derege­tory,” or “Deroga­tory,” I sin­cerely apol­o­gize ahead of time for giv­ing you the Dim Mak.

For the sec­ond week in a row, we bounced back from a half­time deficit to tie the game late, only to lose at the last sec­ond. This time we watched on as the Yale kicker bounced a field goal off the post and in as time ex­pired. The loss was heart­break­ing — per­haps not as heart­break­ing as “The Note­book” (2004), but tough to swal­low nonethe­less — and dropped us to 2-2 on the sea­son.

We didn’t get off to a great start as Yale took the ball first and marched down the field to score a touch­down and make it 7-0. Fri­day was bingo night at Col­lis, which meant I was emo­tion­ally drained by kick­off on Sat­ur­day, but I don’t think that fully ex­plains our slow start for two rea­sons. 1) I am still side­lined with a con­cus­sion, and my game day re­spon­si­bil­i­ties were lim­ited to hand­ing out Gatorade and keep­ing my fin­gers crossed dur­ing im­por­tant plays, and 2) only a few other peo­ple on the team care about bingo as much as I do. For­tu­nately, we re­sponded with a touch­down and field goal of our own to take a 10-7 lead in the 2nd quar­ter.

At that point I no­ticed a pro­mo­tional “Deal or No Deal” con­test going on near our side­line. The game re­quired the con­tes­tant to blindly pick be­tween two prizes. This par­tic­u­lar con­tes­tant made a ter­ri­ble choice and missed out on free Celtics tick­ets, or some­thing like that. I started laugh­ing (which is ad­mit­tedly a lit­tle bit twisted), but was quickly over­come by the mem­ory of a sim­i­lar “Deal or No Deal” type de­ci­sion that haunts me to this day.

At the be­gin­ning of my sopho­more Sum­mer, Joe Zim­ring ’11 bet me $200 that I could not go the en­tire sum­mer with­out check­ing my e-mail/Blitz. Never one to back away from a chal­lenge, I agreed to his terms and went on with my life. After about a month and a half of miss­ing im­por­tant syl­labus changes and show­ing up to can­celled classes, Joe asked if he could look at my blitz ac­count to see what else I had missed. I thought it sounded like a funny idea and gave him my con­sent. He scrolled through for about a minute, chuck­ling oc­ca­sion­ally, until he sud­denly got very se­ri­ous. He told me there was some­thing I should prob­a­bly see.

Rewind about two months to the end of Spring term, when one day my friend Tyler Green ’11 told me that some­body was doing a study and pay­ing stu­dents $25 to get tested for tu­ber­cu­lo­sis. This sounded like the deal of the cen­tury so I took my test, col­lected my cash and to­tally for­got about it. You can prob­a­bly tell where this is going by now, but fast for­ward back to the Sum­mer and the blitz that Joe was look­ing at (dated about 3 weeks ear­lier) read some­thing like this: “Hi Kevin, your blood work came back pos­i­tive for tu­ber­cu­lo­sis. Please alert us to your where­abouts im­me­di­ately. Your blood also showed that you are half man, half titan.” For­tu­nately it turned out that I had la­tent (in­ac­tive) TB and it wasn’t any­thing that nine al­co­hol-free months of med­ica­tion couldn’t han­dle.

When I snapped out of my “Deal or No Deal” in­duced day­dream, it was the be­gin­ning of the sec­ond half and we were trail­ing 13-10. Then we scored, they scored, we scored again, and they scored last to seal the 23-20 vic­tory. We had some trou­ble slow­ing down Yale run­ning back Morde­cai Cargill, but he has ab­solutely the coolest name of any run­ning back we will face the rest of the year, and I’m there­fore not con­cerned about our rush de­fense mov­ing for­ward.

Next week­end we play Holy Cross, who has got­ten off to a 3-3 start de­spite los­ing record-set­ting QB Do­minic Ran­dolph to grad­u­a­tion. It will be good for our guys to see how Holy Cross has dealt with the loss of such an im­por­tant player, con­sid­er­ing this is my last sea­son and all. It’s our final non-league game be­fore we get into the Ivy League stretch run, and it will be big in terms of set­ting the tone for the rest of the sea­son. It’s also a home game so hope­fully you guys will all come out. I never re­ally know how to end these posts with­out being awk­ward, so this week I’m not even going to try.