Life," a hippie sage once said, "is what happens while you're making other plans."

By the time Jeffrey Marx was done writing his new book, Season of Life, about Gilman School football and two of its coaches, Joe Ehrmann and Biff Poggi, he must have understood Jerry Garcia's philosophy all too well.

"I couldn't have foreseen all that happened in the making of this book," he says. "I'm not that talented. The chain of coincidences goes on and on. If this were fiction, I don't think anybody would believe it."

It's not that Marx, a Washington-based author, lacked a good story: In 1974, Marx, a curly-haired 11-year-old, happened to meet Ehrmann, then a star defensive lineman for the Baltimore Colts. The two hit it off and stayed in touch over the years as Marx became a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. Ehrmann, a 260-pound bear of a man, reassessed his life, went to theology school and found his calling as a minister. "Let's face it," says Marx, "How often does a famous athlete leave behind the privileges of fame for a life of serving others?"

The answer, as Marx, a frequent Sports Illustrated contributor, knows, is: not very often. And few should be surprised that in Season of Life - being launched nationally by JAM Publishing in Baltimore on Saturday - he mines the power of such a tale.

What few, including Marx, could have seen coming, is the way Ehrmann, the punishing lineman who awed him as a boy, pursues him and shakes him to his core as a man. By the end of Season, Ehrmann and Poggi, his coaching soulmate, have blitzed their own players and the author with the very force that transformed their own lives - love.

What is left is a whole new sense of what it means to be a man.

On the eve of the book's release, Marx marvels at how it has brought his life full circle. "The whole story was unexpected," he says. "I could pinpoint 50 events and ask, 'How could that have happened?' And yet without this event, that one would never have taken place. It's almost scary."

Ehrmann, now a pastor at Grace Fellowship Church in Timonium, calls it providence. "It's interesting how we end up sharing our journeys with certain people," he says. "I don't see that as happenstance."

The pair's journey begins in 1974, when Richard Marx, a stoic New York actuary, sends his second son to McDonogh School for a tennis camp. Jeffrey's lessons all come off the court. The NFL's Colts happen to be training at McDonogh that summer, and Jeffrey watches the players every chance he gets. Their reaction is anything but typical.

The quarterback, Bert Jones, speaks to him. Toni Linhart, the kicker, learns his name. Ehrmann, the Colts' first-round draft pick out of Syracuse in 1973, takes note of him, makes him unofficial team go-fer and grants the ultimate token of acceptance: a nickname. Little white kid with a major Afro? "Let's call him 'Brillo,'" Ehrmann said.

To Jeffrey, these players were gods, but their real magic had little to do with football.

Take Ehrmann. Marx recalls him as an "enchanting blend of warmth and wittiness," the "glue" of that team. Colts of all backgrounds partied at his home; bikers and barflies were his buddies. He was the team's "go-to guy" for charity work, and he was "always reaching out to pull someone else in," says Marx.

Tennis faded from Marx's life, but the Colts did not. He was their ballboy for four summers. He played long-toss with Jones, got to know the Linharts. Ehrmann kept tabs on his progress in school.

Today, Marx the grown-up can't tell you where the Colts finished in the standings during the middle to late 1970s. He doesn't know how many sacks Ehrmann notched in his 13-year career. But Marx would be taking notes in 2001, his head spinning, as Ehrmann, now a Gilman football coach, addressed his charges.

"I don't care how many wins and losses you have," the massive reverend with the well-trimmed white beard told his players. "It doesn't matter. Twenty years from now, no one's going to remember that stuff at all. What matters is how much you've loved, and been loved by, other people."

The first piece

As Marx recounts it, he thought he'd always stay in touch with Ehrmann. But as the '70s came and went, life intervened. Marx went off to college, then took a job at a newspaper. Ehrmann started an inner-city community center in Baltimore. Marx followed Ehrmann's career, but for years they didn't speak.

Then Marx read, in 2001, that Baltimore planned to raze Memorial Stadium, former home of his beloved Colts. It was time, he decided, for a "where are they now?" story. Part of the plan was to create biographical boxes on dozens of the former players, some who had become bankers, businessmen, restaurateurs.

But Ehrmann didn't fit in a box. A pastor at 4,000-member Grace Fellowship, a coach at Gilman, head of a foundation called Building Men For Others, he contradicted most stereotypes of the typical ex-jock.

Ehrmann had gained fame in Baltimore, and like many ex-athletes, he could have spent the rest of his life cashing in. But football, he found, had basically misled him.

"I had expectations that professional football would help me find some kind of purpose and meaning," Ehrmann says in the book. "But really, all I found in the NFL was more confusion. I kept having the belief that if it wasn't going to be this contract, I would certainly find some kind of serenity or peace ... with the next contract, the next girl, the next house, the next car, the next award."

When Ehrmann's younger brother died of leukemia, it prompted some soul-searching.

Football, he realized, fostered harmful concepts of masculinity. His own dad had taught him that "boys don't cry," that only aggression brought acceptance. He had never enjoyed football for its own sake but rather viewed every down as a way of gaining approval. Football's idea of manhood - a caricature of the culture's at large - guaranteed confusion and loneliness.

In his inner-city ministry, The Door, he had dealt for years with drugs, poverty and family disintegration, but in the end, he found, "all these problems [were] symptoms of the single biggest failure of our society. We simply don't do a good enough job of teaching boys how to be men."

Ehrmann set out to change that. His foundation, Building Men For Others, codified the qualities that football had never taught him: empathy, affirmation and inclusiveness. Real masculinity, he decided, "ought to be taught in terms of the capacity to love and be loved."

"If you look over your life at the end," he says in Season of Life, "it won't be measured in terms of success based on what you've acquired or achieved or what you own. It's gonna come down to this: What kind of father were you? What kind of husband were you? What kind of coach or teammate were you? What kind of son were you? What kind of brother were you? What kind of friend were you?"

Ehrmann had turned the sports code inside out. This was no simple bio box, Marx thought. This was a book.

Getting started

Marx knew Season of Life would spotlight Ehrmann's life and work, but he didn't quite know how. His coaching work might make a good chapter, he thought. So in August 2001, he went to his first practice at Gilman.

The head coach, Biff Poggi, a 1979 Gilman graduate and a close friend of Ehrmann's, blew his whistle to gather his charges. Fifty-three boys in shoulder pads clustered around him. Like any good coach, he exhorted them with a yell.

"What's our job as coaches?" cried Poggi.

"To love us!" hollered most of the boys.

"What's your job as players?"

"To love each other!"

Marx was stunned. He didn't know whether to laugh or take notes. It wasn't long before he learned this was a ritual at Gilman. It was, in fact, the foundation of the program.

Granted, the Greyhounds have the X's and O's covered. Ehrmann is the defensive coordinator, and Poggi, also a former lineman, starred at Duke. The offensive coach was an All-Pro tight end. "It doesn't hurt to have talent," says Ehrmann. "We've got know-how, and we've been lucky enough to have good athletes."

But that's not what has made Gilman football. "I guarantee you," says Marx, who has covered many big-time sports, "there isn't a sports program in the country like that one. It's the most extraordinary thing I've ever seen."

For one thing, Ehrmann and Poggi never cut players on the basis of athletic ability. "If you come out, you're one of us," they tell the boys, "and we love you. Simple as that." They play each boy in the first half of every game. On game days, they hold chapel services at which they share stories that tell of empathy and inclusion, mercy and love. Football is rarely mentioned.

"If we could get away with it," says Poggi with a laugh, "Joe and I would do nothing but those chapels."

Gilman football, it turns out, has become an extension of Ehrmann's ministry.

"If you do the important things right, the by-product is that you can't help but have kids who are enthusiastic and enjoy playing the game," he says. "In that enjoyment and enthusiasm, as a by-product, you're going to produce some wins."

As any Baltimore sports fan knows, Gilman does that. In the six years Poggi and Ehrmann have run the program, the Greyhounds have rolled to three undefeated seasons and three No. 1 rankings in the state; made USA Today's national Top 15, and graduated players to prestigious college programs.

This, it finally dawned on Marx, was the story: the Ehrmann philosophy, making itself manifest on high school football fields over the course of a season. And so Season of Life chronicles the Greyhounds throughout 2001. On the field, it was less than Gilman's best year, but Marx chronicles triumphs more profound than anything found on a scoreboard.

One boy, thinking of teammates first, stifles the urge to avenge a cheap shot. Another finds in a long interception return a way of to overcome the death of a friend. After a hard-fought defeat, Poggi gathers the boys and tells them he'd rather coach them than any group on earth. Time and again, teen-age boys, unprompted, proclaim their love for each other.

After each game, Poggi and Ehrmann assess their own performance. What are their criteria? Says Ehrmann: "We ask how we did in our ministry. We ask how we affirmed the boys. We ask what we did to help them become men."

Interdependence

In the end, it probably says something about Marx's project that Gilman's 2001 season comes down to the last play of the year: The Greyhounds' kicker, a senior who earlier blew a game with a missed field goal, sets up for a 37-yarder.

More compelling still, the tableau epitomizes Building Men For Others. The kicker, the son of a prominent bank executive, must depend on his holder, the son of a Baltimore City bus driver, the whole team's fate hanging in the balance. It isn't lost on Marx that the scene unfolds on the McDonogh campus where he'd met Ehrmann 29 years before.

By the end of the book, Marx, nearing 40, has learned his lesson: The story won't be finished until he completes a circle of his own. He must rectify matters with his own father, now a math teacher in New York. That scene has more suspense and import than the last play of any game.

As he looks back on his experience, Marx ponders the string of coincidences. What if he'd never gone to tennis camp? What if Ehrmann, the star player, hadn't taken time to speak with him? What if, years later, Poggi and Ehrmann didn't happen to see eye-to-eye as coaches?

Would Marx have come to love his Colts? Would he be a writer today? Would he have reconnected with Ehrmann? Would his father, now 69, ever have gotten his chance to change?

They are questions Marx can't answer. But as he found in his Season of Life, learning to ask them is almost enough.

Season of Life can be bought online at www.seasonoflife.com and at Barnes and Noble Books in Towson. A benefit launch party for the book is scheduled for Saturday at California Pizza Kitchen, 201 E. Pratt St. A $50 donation pays for dinner and a copy of the book and supports JAM's books-to-schools program in Maryland.