The random date landed on Thursday, March 5, 2020, and the first surviving artifacts were four photographs of feminine products.

I was standing in a store aisle texting Heidi because I did not know which tampons and pads she wanted. She asked for Kotex super tampons, store-brand regular pads with wings and maybe some chocolate. I sent pictures. She told me which boxes were right and which were wrong. A few minutes later I had them and was heading home. It is exactly the kind of ordinary evidence Random Date Archaeology tends to reward: a domestic errand that would never have survived in my memory on its own.

But March 5 was not quite an ordinary Thursday. Earlier that day Heidi had told me Evelyn was feeling sick, although she did not have a fever and it seemed more likely to be period-related. The nurses at Stadium High were already sending a lot of kids home because, as Heidi put it, “They’re not taking chances.” That afternoon she got her first email about the possibility of Tacoma Public Schools closing. The message asked families to bring extra nonperishable food and supplies so they could be sent home with people who might need them if schools closed for a few weeks.

At work, we were having our own version of the same conversation. Tacoma Defiance were about to open their home season, and we were discussing whether players should stop signing autographs after games and whether the kids who walked out with them should avoid holding hands. None of this felt like the end of anything yet. It felt like a list of increasingly strange precautions being added to a normal workday.

And my normal workday was already pretty full. I was the only video person, which meant every video project eventually fell into my lap. During the offseason Casey Catherwood had given me a loose assignment to go around Tacoma and collect beautiful, interesting footage of the city. I had time to wander for that material, but almost no time with the actual players. We would get them only days before the first game, while several other projects were already moving at once.

One of those offseason excursions nearly drowned my phone.

In January I went to Titlow Beach to shoot a timelapse. I set my phone and tripod on the jetty, walked a few yards away with headphones in and waited. Then the audio in my headphones cut out. I looked up and the tripod was gone. I ran over and saw one tripod leg down in Puget Sound, stripped to my underwear and dove in after it. It took a couple tries, but I got the tripod back. The phone was gone.

I went home, showered and explained the whole ridiculous story to Casey. His response, as I remember that period of working together, was much more caring than angry. The surviving texts show him quietly telling me to replace the phone and that the team would reimburse the $250. When I said I was going back at low tide the next morning to see whether I could find it, he basically told me to go check and come into the office afterward. He even thanked me, jokingly, for my “commitment to Sparkle Motion.”

The next night I texted him that I had come home with a very waterlogged phone. I dried it in rice for a few days, eventually got it to turn on and recovered the timelapse. The stupid thing had recorded the whole adventure, including me diving into the Sound looking for the tripod!

That particular shot did not make the Defiance intro, but the story explains something about the footage that did. Those city images were not anonymous B-roll pulled from a library. I had spent the winter physically going out and gathering Tacoma. Sometimes gathering Tacoma apparently meant jumping into Puget Sound in my underwear.

The actual Defiance piece came together fast. Casey had some visuals he wanted to capture and gave me a few ideas, then mostly set me free. We worked together to shoot the player headshots. I went through gameplay footage looking for the right goals and moments, mixed that with the Tacoma material I had been collecting, and when it was time to edit I asked Casey for music. He handed me a song.

That was usually where the handoff happened between us. Casey had an extraordinary instinct for tone and music. He could throw out things like record scratches, weird sounds, Tacoma history, an MF DOOM kind of feeling, and I understood what he was reaching for. Then I had to make it alive in the video. Looking back at the work now, it is genuinely difficult for me to tell where his creative fingerprints end and mine begin.

The texts from March 4 preserve the process in miniature. I was trying to find good goals from players who were still on the team, doing a quick color correction and audio pass, and telling Casey I would add more city material. He was pitching local-history audio, Tacoma clips, “City of Destiny… destiny… DEFIANCE,” record scratches and weird sounds. He watched one draft fifteen times and thought it was close. The next morning he asked the question that probably describes my entire job at that point: “You know the work load better than anyone else! Do you still believe it will all get done by tomorrow?”

The answer, apparently, was yes. There was constant stress. Player access came late. Games created immovable deadlines. Multiple projects competed for the same hours. But I loved making fun videos that showed off our city and our players. That combination mattered. I was overloaded, and I was fulfilled.

On March 6, the video finally left the editing timeline and filled the big screen as the Defiance players took the field. I do not remember every emotion from that moment, but I remember being happy and proud. Months of wandering Tacoma, a frantic player shoot, gameplay footage, Casey’s song and our increasingly strange creative shorthand had become part of the actual game-day atmosphere.

I remember the video being shown only a couple of times. Tacoma Defiance played again on March 11. Then the season stopped. When I looked up the 2020 schedule during this excavation, that March 11 game was the last one until July 13. The remaining season did not become the crowded stadium season we had been building toward, and I remember how sad I was when it became clear that this little film we had poured so much into was not going to get the audience we made it for.

The archive gives that feeling a date.

On the morning of March 12, the day after that last game, I texted Casey that I was on my way in and wanted to record anything we still needed as soon as possible. I also said I needed time to consolidate everything so I could bring my workstation home. I remember the president of the company calling everyone into a meeting that day and pretty much sending us all home.

By early afternoon the office had already become a Slack channel. I told Casey, “Slack is all set up but I’m lonely as the only person logged in.” A few minutes later he said he was heading home to get a song and log in too. Then I had to run to the store because the mouse pad I had brought home from work kept slipping around on my table.

Seven days earlier I had been finishing a walkout video for a new soccer season while school closures, autograph rules and hand-holding precautions hovered around the edges of the day. Now the video department was sitting at home trying to make a mouse work on the dining-room table.

The season had barely opened.