Zane Hamill, known to his family and friends as Z, begins his seventh-grade soccer season on a nationally ranked team that has steadily climbed the competition ladder. But on the morning of his first game, he wakes up with a pit in his stomach that feels like a humongous meatball.

Once coached by his dad, who was seriously injured in a car accident that Z thinks was his fault, he is no longer surrounded by best friends, those who played alongside him since kindergarten. With the team gunning for a tournament in Las Vegas, the stakes are high. The pressure is on. 

As a team's best passer, the glue that holds it together, Z struggles with the balance between playing for keeps and playing for fun. Without the guidance of his dad, he must decide what role soccer should play in his life. He must uncover the goal of the game.

Harvey Araton is a longtime sports journalist who has written for four New York newspapers, including working twenty-five years at the New York Times, where he wrote the Sports of the Times column. He is the author, coauthor, or editor of nine books. Driving Mr. Yogi was a New York Times bestseller. When the Garden Was Eden was made into an ESPN 30-for-30 documentary, which he coproduced. He is the author of Cold Type, a novel, published in 2014. Araton was nominated by the Times for the Pulitzer Prize in 1994. He was a media inductee to the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 2017. He graduated from the City University of New York in 1975. He lives in Montclair, NJ with his wife. They have two adult sons.