Just to go off on a tangent, there also exists the legal idea of ‘adverse possession’, accepted in most US states as far as I know. It is essentially the common law principle that if you retain possession (usually of land) of something for several years or more, and nobody makes a claim on it or tells you to leave, then you have legal possession of the item.
So if Cegan had never bothered those big kids to get his stuff back, they’d have had a legal right to it by now.
FWIW, I think it originally was, “If you can maintain possession of the ball for most of the game, you’ll win by nine points.”