On the day they posed for the team photo in their black and silver football uniforms, the boys were still champions.

That autumn of 1992, the south Sacramento Raiders Junior Midgets were mostly 12 and 13 years old. They hadn't lost a game.

Yet today, Tyrone Rhinehart isn't reliving childhood triumph. He's sitting in Meadowview's community center, a few miles from the football field his team once ruled, scouring the faces of his long-ago friends. They stare back from inside a smudged plastic frame, sealed in a moment 15 years ago.

What Tyrone sees in the photograph is wasted potential, lives gone awry.

That round-eyed boy in the second row? Shot to death, Tyrone says. He points to another boy in the third row: So was he.

Bullets stole the lung of this boy; that one stands accused of killing his girlfriend.

Tyrone turns his attention to a small, serious face in the second row: himself as a boy, already hardened to the world.

"There has been," he says simply, "a lot of loss."

On the morning of the photo shoot at Jackman Middle School, the teammates did not yet realize that the years ahead would prove their toughest opponent.

Statistically, boys like them -- most were African American and growing up in lower-income, violent neighborhoods -- would be the most likely to head to prison, the least likely to graduate high school. The greatest obstacle to reaching their 30th birthdays? Homicide.

As the 1992 season opened, some of the Raiders already seemed destined for trouble, while others clung to their childhood innocence -- though the coming years would prove such early indications less than reliable.

One of the fastest kids on the team, and one of the toughest, was Clifford McDowell. At 13, he considered himself a grown man and for a year had been driving himself to practice in a Buick Skylark he bought with drug money.

The team's popular jokester, Boyega "Mike" Adelekan, was a budding entrepreneur. He sold sour gumballs from the discount store to his teammates, at a profit.

Wyatt Johnson was among the team's stockiest and most talented athletes, yet he sometimes confided to his mother that he hated himself.

Lanky Cory Gathing was a dedicated, competitive player with a coach for a dad. He was a sometime honor roll student who could ace a test without studying.

And then there was troubled Tyrone Rhinehart. His teammates, with few exceptions, nurtured NFL dreams. Not Tyrone. By age 18, he expected to be dead.

They were five boys among the 35 on the team roster that fall, all standing on the precipice of adulthood. For some, it would be their last year playing PeeWee football.

Their teenage years would unfold just as young men in Sacramento's poorest neighborhoods were being swept up in a wave of crack sales and gang shootings. Killings would decline in the latter part of the decade, only to rise again.

In April 2006, one of the 1992 Raiders' most talented quarterbacks joined the list of casualties. Wyatt Johnson's cousin, LaMarr Alexander, the round-eyed boy wearing jersey No. 21, was shot in the back by an Elk Grove police officer after he crashed a 1993 Oldsmobile into an off-duty patrol car.

The officer was later cleared of wrongdoing, but LaMarr's descent from promise to tragedy underscored the risks faced by his teammates as they grew from boys to men.

After spending childhoods so devoted to football and the exhilaration of smoothly executed tackles and touchdowns, why did some gravitate toward a street culture of gangs and guns and drug sales? How would others avoid it? What futures did the teammates anticipate as children? What choices did they make as adolescents? What kinds of men did they become?

Just being a Raider gave them a leg up on their peers. The organization was formed to offer an alternative to the streets; the physical contact and teamwork of the game helped many boys stay grounded. And most of the teammates had an additional advantage: Somebody loved each of them enough to pay their football fees, wash their uniforms and get them to practices.