During the offseason, along with the deep winter came the school's final exams.
After the October monthly exam, the students went through two more tests in November and December.
Overall, their rankings improved by about one to two hundred places. Although the extent of progress varied among them, it was still quite noticeable.
This was why parents felt comfortable letting the students continue playing football.
However, when it came to Wen Chengye, exams were a different story.
Wen Chengye's final exam results dropped by over 170 places.
It was a subtle score.
He didn't seem to have cheated and completed the papers himself, so his results had simply returned to his normal level. But there was another possibility...
On the evening Lin Wanxing distributed the final exam papers, she sat on the rooftop with Wang Fa, analyzing the situation.
Wang Fa: "Are you worried Wen Chengye's parents will come knocking on your door demanding answers?"
Lin Wanxing: "Well, I am a bit concerned about that, but his parents haven't shown up yet! I just think his score is strange."
"Teacher Lin, just say it directly - do you think Wen Chengye intentionally answered some questions wrong to make his results appear less exaggerated, so you wouldn't bother him about it?"
"Hey, I don't want to bother him, and even if I think that, I have no evidence." Lin Wanxing took a sip of her tea, warming her hands around the cup. "Besides, what if I did have evidence?"
She spoke somewhat slowly.
Since Wen Chengye joined them, they had all lived together for many days.
From being completely out of place at the beginning, he was gradually fitting in.
He started doing homework instead of casually handing in blank papers.
On the field, he could execute tactical plays with everyone instead of doing whatever he wanted regardless of others.
The students still argued and made noise among themselves, but they all shared a common goal - to win next year's match against Yuzhou Silver Elephant.
It seemed that from youth to adulthood, everyone's change was learning to tolerate each other.
But some things would never change.
Hearing this, Wang Fa suddenly asked: "What do you want to change? Make Wen Chengye voluntarily stop cheating, or turn himself in?"
Lin Wanxing slapped the table: "Good question, coach hit the nail on the head!"
The glass cup full of tea jumped on the table, and Wang Fa was slightly startled too.
Lin Wanxing: "The answer is still - I don't know."
The warm yellow light of the winter night fell on Wang Fa's face.
Just like you don't know what you're looking for regarding football; I also don't know what kind of people I want Wen Chengye or these students to become.
But I think we can be more patient and wait a bit longer.
——
Lin Wanxing stood at the podium, assigning the final assessment question for the football team students.
— Football is for victory.
She wrote this line on the blackboard.
"Football is for victory?"
"Who told you football is just about winning?"
"What do you mean, our final exam is just one line?"
The classroom erupted, students' voices rising one after another. They had many opinions, their voices more intense than the grandmother upstairs frying oil cakes.
Lin Wanxing calmly wiped the chalk dust from her hands, waiting for them to finish shouting. Only when the classroom returned to quiet did she say: "Yes, this semester's final exam is this question."
"You call what's on the blackboard a question?"
The students began to protest.
Lin Wanxing smiled: "Why not?"
"Then what do you want us to do?""Writing an essay?"
The students chewed on their pen caps, utterly bewildered, and began to let their minds wander.
"I know! Win the match to prove this question?" Lin Lu had a sudden inspiration.
Lin Wanxing smiled: "Well, that’s not entirely out of the question."
"Huh?"
The boys spoke in unison, their loud confusion echoing through the small classroom.
"What’s the matter?" Lin Wanxing rubbed her ears and asked.
"No, teacher, what exactly do you mean by this?"
Lin Wanxing stood at the podium while the students looked completely lost.
"This is just a theme. You can complete it in whatever way you want."
The students were baffled.
At first, they didn’t think they had much to say about this final exam question.
Their initial reaction was to agree, thinking, "Isn’t this just stating the obvious?" But upon further reflection, they felt, "Well, maybe it’s not entirely that simple."
So they exchanged glances, stuck in a state where they had taken a breath but couldn’t quite exhale.
It was indeed a question that made one overthink.
Why do people study? Why do they play soccer? Or even more fundamentally, why do people live?
Everyone had their own answers and had pondered these questions to some extent.
But most of the time, for the boys, their responses were along the lines of—
"Why does playing soccer need so many reasons?" Qin Ao retorted.
"Teacher, I think you just tend to overthink things," Lin Lu also stammered.
Lin Wanxing didn’t deny that there was some truth to what they said.
"But occasionally, at the end of the semester, it’s quite interesting to talk about this question." Lin Wanxing glanced toward the corner of the classroom, where Wang Fa had, at some point, taken a seat.
"There’s no reason," Qin Ao said. "Back then, our coach came to pick players. It was during elementary school P.E. class, and I was really young. The coach said I had a talent for soccer and told me to give it a try, so I started playing."
Zheng Ren raised his hand: "My dad’s a longtime soccer fan, so he sent me to the coach to play."
"Coach?"
Lin Wanxing was curious about the person the students all mentioned without prior agreement.
"Yeah, back in elementary school, we all played soccer with our coach at the small field in the Workers' Cultural Palace," Lin Lu said.
"My parents signed me up for a random class because they got off work late. Our coach ran a soccer training class," Yu Ming replied.
"So you’ve been together since elementary school," Lin Wanxing remarked with some emotion.
"Teacher, that’s kind of gross. What do you mean, 'been together since elementary school'?"
"Then how should I put it? Should I use a different term, like 'childhood sweethearts'?" Lin Wanxing laughed.
The boys’ faces twisted with even more disgust.
"Not me. I only joined them in middle school," Feng Suo said.
"Yeah, this guy came later. We were really strong back in elementary school—just raw talent. We’d play after school, no formal training matches, but we always won when we played against others." Qin Ao grew animated as he recounted their past glories. "Then when we started middle school, some of us went to different schools, so our goalkeeper and defenders changed."
When defenders were mentioned, Wen Chengye shot a cold glance.
It seemed he had also joined later.
"What about your middle school coach? Was it still the same one?"“Right, Coach Jiang was our PE teacher in middle school. The soccer training class was an extracurricular program he ran. Later, when fewer people signed up for soccer, he closed the training class and focused on coaching us,” Fu Xinshu continued.
“Coach Jiang.” Lin Wanxing mulled over the surname, then asked with a smile, “So, was your middle school team any good?”
“What kind of question is that? Of course we were good! We even made it to the provincial championship finals back then! We were freaking awesome,” Lin Lu boasted.
“That was because I was awesome, not you,” Qin Ao said, lifting his chin proudly.
“Were you the top scorer in the provincial championship?”
Qi Liang’s slow, deliberate voice drifted over.
Qin Ao immediately turned to glare at him.
Standing at the podium, Lin Wanxing felt a breeze from the window carrying the scent of pickled vegetable and shredded pork noodles. Listening to the students noisily recounting stories from the past, she didn’t feel hungry at all.
“So, you all went to high school together later?” she asked, suddenly recalling something Teacher Qian from the PE department had mentioned earlier.
“Yeah, our coach helped negotiate the terms for our sports recruitment. We had good soccer records too, so we were all recruited into Hongjing No. 8 Middle School and started high school together.”
“Your coach arranged for you to go to high school?” Lin Wanxing was somewhat surprised.
“Yeah, who knows what the old man was thinking. He just said our best path was still to attend high school,” Qin Ao replied.
“Didn’t he send you to any youth training teams?” Lin Wanxing couldn’t help voicing her confusion. “When I first met Chen Jianghe, he was being sweet-talked by a scout. Since you were all so good in middle school, didn’t your coach take you to try out for professional youth teams?”
Hearing this question, the students exchanged glances, then shook their heads.
At that moment, Lin Wanxing began to form a rough idea of what the coach was like.
Teacher Jiang was passionate about soccer and wanted to build his own team, so he selected and trained these students from a young age. But as they grew older, he seemed to waver on how best to guide them.
In Lin Wanxing’s view, he had chosen the path of soccer for them and led them along it for a long time.
If he truly believed in this path, he should have worked hard to steer them toward a genuine professional soccer career. But that coach hadn’t done so.
He sent all of them to high school, believing they had to attend—not a single one could be left behind—and he made it happen.
“What happened after that?” Lin Wanxing asked the students. “After you started high school, did Coach Jiang continue teaching soccer at the middle school?”
“After we entered high school, Coach Jiang came to watch our games and guide us at first, but later we lost touch,” Fu Xinshu said calmly.
The classroom fell quiet again.
It seemed this was how the story was meant to end.
Teachers or coaches—they were all just passing figures in students’ lives. Even if they had accompanied each other through a long period of growth, it was easy to drift apart after parting ways.
“You never mentioned Coach Jiang before. Next time there’s a chance, we should invite him to watch us play,” Lin Wanxing said with a smile.
“Coach Jiang, he…” Lin Lu suddenly turned to look at Wang Fa, then said, “He also told us one day that he was going to Yongchuan to work on youth training, and then he just left.”Fu Xinshu spoke very matter-of-factly, and it was only now that Lin Wanxing finally realized where the students' calmness came from after learning that Wang Fa was leaving.
They had indeed been through this before.
Lin Wanxing remained silent for a while.
"We're mature men now—we've been through more situations than you think," Zheng Feiyang said, breaking the silence to lighten the mood.
Despite her inner reflections, Lin Wanxing couldn't help but be amused by the phrase "mature men."
"Did any of you cry?" she asked.
"Of course," Qin Ao said, pointing at Lin Lu. "He hugged the coach and kept sobbing 'don't go'—it was so damn pathetic."
As the conversation reached this point,
the students all wore bewildered expressions.
When asked why they wanted to play soccer,
it seemed like back when the coach picked them and said they had talent, they just kept playing.
Things were fine from elementary to middle school, but when they entered high school, their longtime guide suddenly left, and they abruptly lost their direction and purpose in life.
In that high school where they never quite fit in, they gradually ended up where they are today.
"After the principal stopped pushing the school soccer program, and after Coach Jiang left, you didn't continue playing?"
"It wasn't really about the coach. Something happened that year, and we just stopped playing," Qin Ao said, glancing at Fu Xinshu before speaking directly.
"What happened?" Lin Wanxing asked.
"You ask too many questions, woman!" Qin Ao rarely evaded so obviously, changing the subject. "Just tell us what kind of nonsense your final assignment is really about!"
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