Gately watches the punter: two years younger, and still in the game

The whole gap in one flat sentence. The kid on the screen doing the thing Gately was built to do "was two years younger than Don Gately" — the distance between the gift kept and the gift squandered measured out as twenty-four months and a habit. The body that quit and the body that bore down are nearly the same age; only one is still on a field.