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JUCO Players' Last-Chance Dreams Endure Even as Their Season Is on Hold

Mark Duda is cooking pork loin on a humid August night in northern Pennsylvania.

Normally, he spends his nights indoors this time of year—eating dinner alongside his assistants while grinding over the day's practice film. It's a summer ritual that the head coach of Lackawanna College, one of the nation's most dominant junior college football programs, has lived and breathed for more than two decades.

But with his season postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, he finds himself alone in his backyard this year, watching the pine trees sway back and forth.

This is not the August he chose.