(UPDATE: The Brookfield East Spartans won the Wisconsin Division II State Football Championship on November 17, 2016, defeating Monona Grove 42-36 at Camp Randall Stadium in Madison. This marks the first football title in school history. Running back Sam Santiago-Lloyd set a championship game record, scoring five touchdowns with 37 carries and 197 yards rushing).
Here’s the thing about hometowns: we might pack up and leave them, but they never really leave us.
And so it is with Brookfield, Wisconsin, my very own shining city on a hill, which once carried my childhood dreams and adolescent glories on its grass-scented breezes as reliably as the sturdiest oak framing City Hall on Calhoun Road. I am a native son of this scenic square of the American landscape, situated in the shadows of the steel and fire of Milwaukee, but a world unto itself of freshly mowed lawns, neatly paved streets and fiercely loyal, hardworking citizens. From a map’s view, Brookfield is north of Chicago, west of Milwaukee, east of Madison and south of... well, a whole lot of rolling green hillsides and Canada.
That's my hometown, where my parents and many friends still reside. It's the place my mom and dad chose to relocate a family of six children, a live-in grandma and a black lab named Spike. Our family had lived in a crowded house in the center of Milwaukee, but in the Bicentennial summer of '76, we packed up our wagons and headed west (about nine miles west, to be exact). So goes the story of so many Brookfield residents – although incorporated in 1954, the town population really boomed in the 60’s and 70’s, a by-product of America’s suburban migration and sprawl. Brookfield is a land of midcentury dreamers and the families they raised and, now, their children’s children, growing up in a place that epitomizes the promise and prosperity of the American suburb. I'm a grocer's son and a builder's nephew, and my dad and uncle built our family home on a plot of farmland transformed, as so many plots of farmland of that era were, into a sparkling new subdivision.
Brookfield belongs to a corner of the world known as the Midwest, a land of grass and hay and soil and fresh water, where love of God and country and sports teams – quite possibly in the reverse order – are the fervor that fuels thousands to think and breathe as one. In Wisconsin, we’re not just citizens of America, but also the nations of Packer and Badger, Brewer and Buck. My home state is a land of beer and cheese and milk and hands grown rough from hard work and winter air. Wisconsin itself has two distinct identities: an industrial side of asphalt and cement, and a rural side where meadows roll in perfect unison towards the open horizon. Brookfield is, somehow, a blend of them both.
Once upon a time, as an enterprising teenager, I wrote a column for the local newspaper, in which I shared the latest breaking news stories from my high school, Brookfield East. Perhaps you can call this a special commemorative edition of that column, because there is some happy news back home worth telling (and technology has advanced to the point where I can tell the whole country).
This week, my hometown has a very particular distinction. It hasn't been the greatest month for the national spirit, but back home, the pride is flying high. Brookfield may very well be the happiest, most hopeful town in America right now (and after all we've been through, that's saying something). For the first time in history, my alma mater is playing in the state football championship game – they will face a team from Monona, a town near Madison, for the winner’s trophy on Friday. In a typical all-American town where lifelong memories and young dreams and boundless high hopes are born under Friday night lights in the cathedral of high school sports, it's a very big deal and a source of unending civic pride.
Our school team is called the Spartans, and many decades of aspiring godlike adolescents have tried valiantly but fallen short of a hallowed state championship in one of the mega sports, football or basketball. The 1975 football team had an undefeated record before losing their final game of the season to crosstown nemesis Brookfield Central. The 1977 boys’ basketball team reached the state semi-finals. And in 1984, my junior year, the girls' basketball team made it all the way to the state championship game, losing the final in one of the first remembered heartbreaks of my lifetime (and I was just a kid who wrote for the paper and played in the band).
But a new team of Spartan heroes have delivered pride and glory to the Brookfield East side of town (and as a veteran of the film industry, I certainly approve that they got there in Hollywood fashion, beating Brookfield Central along the way, perhaps a little vengeance for the ‘75 team). Like many towns, there are two sides to Brookfield, and while there is certainly no “right or wrong side of the tracks”, there are quite literally train tracks, on Pilgrim Road, that all but divide the fiercely rival high school districts in two. And while the Brookfield Central side has seen state championships, that glory has eluded the East side until, quite possibly, Friday afternoon.
And so, like so many current and past citizens, my heart and hopes go out to Brookfield, a place I left that has never completely left me. As far away as my wandering soul has ventured, I can no more escape it than my own skin. Wherever I am, wherever I go, we’re still a pair: the stately suburban town and me, the former resident grateful for the years spent growing up on its sunlit streets, from the bumper-to-bumper bustle of Blue Mound Road to the flowing fields of Lisbon, the peaceful beauty of Wirth Park and the birds eye vista atop Capitol Drive.
Here’s wishing our Spartan heroes much luck in the championship game, and here’s to happy hometowns everywhere – we might not stay with them long, but they stay with us forever.