Lorenzo Hobbeson has 17,781 career rushing yards. Only Cormac Loomis, who retired with 23,783, has ever had more, and nobody else is within a thousand of second place. Hobbeson is 219 from 18,000, which only Loomis has reached.
On Sunday the Marauders gave him eleven carries for 47 yards and beat the Turbines anyway. Cyrus Wexler, twenty-nine and paid $1.8 million to back him up, took ten carries for 64. Hobbeson did not play in week seven. Through week five he carried it twenty-two times a game; in the three weeks since, twenty-four times in total.
He is thirty-five and the deal that pays him $3.4 million ends in the spring. The depth chart still lists him first. Asked whether he thinks about the number, he talked for a while about the offensive line, and the schedule, and the weather in three road cities, and somewhere in the middle of it said, “I’ve known the number since I was thirty,” and kept going.
He was the last man dressed again, waiting on the one training-room table he has waited on for years while younger men were taped and gone. At the twenty-six yards a week the last three have paid, 18,000 lands in the final fortnight, a few weeks before somebody decides what the year after is worth.