All year we watch these girls play and how is basketball fun? It's work, and exercise and follow through and hating the coach and unfair ref calls and teammate injuries and then a great victory and then a crushing defeat.
When we lost last night at the playoffs for city championship (after last year winning city), in Division 1, the top division, playing the harder teams - it seems like why try. Nicole our senior star player who is like a human vacuum cleaner with the ball, calm, confident, brutal, balletic, ferocious. And then it's so suddenly, the very last game in high school, wait how is this happening? and it's the last few seconds and her sister channels her the ball twice in these quick wait no last few seconds and she misses her shots and the buzzer and it's over.
That's it.
I guess you expect because YOU are HERE that especially the most important games will end with the confetti coming down and everyone jumping up and down, and she'll go out into her college career and life with that one last moment of success, etched in a simple win. The ball going in the basket like nothing.
I guess somehow basketball or life isn't set up that way. B said after the game it's okay. That's what life mostly is. You do a bunch of work and then you lose. Also, he said, it was gonna have to be the last game sometime.
I stood stunned. And then impressed. This from B whose whole life has revolved around these games, and trying to help Lilly be the best she can be, even when she sometimes wouldn't even acknowledge he existed. I admire a true sportsman. I felt stabbed by the pain but he held hands with the pain and offered it some water.
But then, what is it for? In all of the games, there are pure moments of joy you replay, like this night watching our little Lilly take the ball through this impossibly clogged pit of vipers under the basket and the whole heart she showed on her face, she set her face in Avenger mode and she whipped through them skillfully and she hooked the ball up using incredible bodily effort, every inch of her body and spirit used, and the ball dropped in off her fingers like magic.
Learning a skill, practicing it, liking the people who are there along with you for the ride, and then challenging yourself by using your skill IN PUBLIC against fierce rivalry, and then not quitting when things don't go well? Trying again next time or next game or next season? Who does this?
How few times in our life do we not give up but decide to keep going. These kids are 15 16 17, so this is a big thing in their life but they have so many big things about to tidal wave over them, moving out, leaving childhood bedrooms, driving away, setting up lives. Careers, love affairs, break ups, starting families, traveling the globe - maybe everything in life is a big thing.
As we stand on a basketball court on a Tuesday
how lucky then
when the ball doesn't go in and we lose big. And they come out of the locker room to their families who are clustered around the outskirts like a border garden, and the players stand in a clump of each other in the middle and cry and hug and feel the loss and the end of the season and all the work and they are, winning or not, a team still. Winning or crying
together is what they hold their hands up before each game and say
This year's senior players swim off to other lives and college and younger ones come in and sign on to feel glory and pain and pressure
maybe these players in the future when they have problems with new jobs, or family, or unexpected traumas or graduate school or life maybe they know a secret because of that clump of love on the basketball court after a heavy loss, the caring about each other when your heart is ripping after risking greatly, you feel more after a loss but it's there all along isn't it because you created it
just from a stupid orange basketball
By working, trying, risking, caring, believing, being a badass, not caring if you get hurt out there
by taking care of the ball
chasing it, sharing it, stealing it, throwing yourself on it, following it, trusting it, knowing it in your hand, it's only a ball but it drew together a group and in a large rectangle in an old fashioned gym they could know their roles and play
and afterwards celebrate or cry
together
