Steamboats (As A Unit Of Time)

   I imagine that when most of you think of "steamboats" you are taken back to the glory days of side wheelers plowing down the Mississippi or perhaps even the Great Lakes waters, maybe even the coastal and inland waters of B.C.
   To me, however, "steamboat" is a unit of time. It is a unit of time closely approximating one second once you have taken the time to say the word "steamboat" out loud, in normal cadence. As a proviso, you must also add a number to this, as in "one steamboat" or "two steamboats".
   "Steamboats" is the classic method for denoting how long the defence in a game of touch football must wait, after the ball has been snapped, before it is allowed to rush the opposing quarterback. The reason this is used is primarily to allow the offence time to complete some kind of play. In normal football, the offensive players would be able to block the defensive ones, thereby giving the quarterback a little time to run a play. In touch football, though, there is no blocking allowed. This, then, is why "steamboats" are employed.
   It works like this. Before the start of the game, the two teams decide how many "steamboats" will be counted off after the snap of the ball. It will be the job of one of the defensive players to stand there and count the "steamboats" out loud. When he has reached the allotted number of "steamboats", he or anyone else on his team is allowed the rush the quarterback. So what you end up with is one guy standing there, going "one steamboat, two steamboats, three steamboats...etc", while all around him all hell is breaking loose, guys are criss-crossing all over the place, yelling for the ball, cursing and the like.
   I have no idea why the word "steamboat" was chosen. As a spoken unit of time, the number "one thousand" is also used, along with its ascending number ie. one-one thousand, two-one thousand, three-one thousand and so on. Ironically, so is the word "Mississippi" (one mississippi, two mississippi,...) so maybe this is where steamboats came from?
   Generally in a game of touch football you don't go much higher than about eight steamboats. This is probably good, as my experience using steamboats as units of time in other endeavours eg. run/walk intervals, is that "steamboats" becomes a bit of a tongue-twister the higher up you go. I actually did a comparison the other evening as Doralyn, my wife, and I were out doing a training run. I compared "steamboats" with the"one-one thousand" method and found the latter to actually be more precise. Of course, at the same time my heart was beating outside my chest so it was a very subjective kind of test!
   So that's the story on steamboats. It's probably been about 45 years since I've played touch football of the schoolyard variety so have had little opportunity to be on a field counting out steamboats. I'm not even a hundred percent sure that anyone even uses "steamboats" any more. It could very well be they have gone the way of......well.....steamboats...now that I think about it!