10 Epilogue: The Fantasy Continues

On a cold day in 1891, Dr. James Naismith invented the game of basketball at the YMCA in Springfield, MA. He nailed a peach basket 10-feet high on the wall and handed one of his students a soccer ball. “Throw it in the basket,” he said. Later, he took out a piece of parchment in his office, wrote the words “basket” and “ball” at the top, and underneath it wrote the first 13 rules of the game.

A century later, on a cold day in your driveway in Minneapolis, dad taught you a rule of basketball that did not appear on Dr. Naismith’s original list or any other lists of the game’s rules that’s been amended since the day of its birth.

“Never walk off the court without making your last shot.”

That’s what dad said and thus it became law. You weren’t the most obedient child, either, school rules were memorized one minute only to be totally forgotten a minute later. Homework and household chores were always pushed back until the last possible second, a blossoming talent for procrastination on full display year over year. It’s not your fault, you felt, dad also showed you the highlight video “Furious Finishes: the best buzzer beaters in NBA history”; of course you learned to love doing things at the last possible second.

But this rule he only needed to say once. “Never walk off the court without making your last shot.” You never did and you still never have.

Never did a childhood driveway session end without seeing the ball touch the fibers of the net one last time. Or even in public when it was awkward to pull off, like after that one particularly tough loss in 7th grade, the year you got cut for the first time and sent to play with the team you needed, but not the team you wanted.

You shot 0-for-8 that day, and another set of 7th graders were scheduled to tip off immediately after your game. A nameless ref, your lifelong enemy, yelling across that court at Concordia College “what the hell are you doing, Number Four?!” as you inserted yourself in another team’s pregame ritual of layup lines to softly toss the ball up one more time so it could kiss the glass, graze the rim, and fall through the net. Only then could you step off the court and join your teammates to recap the loss. You could have stopped to explain to the ref, but explanations are lost on their kind, as you know, so you just made the shot and winked at him, and one more time he asked, perhaps justifiably, “What the hell?!”

Make your last shot for the truths and for the lies alike. Because in the right light, “lies” is just another way of saying “legends.” Make your last shot for The Last Dance, and its many lies. Make your last shot for Michael Jordan’s Playground, a different movie revolving around a single, specific lie, but still held the truth MJ spoke at the beginning of the movie on being one kid, alone on the playground, “This is where you fall in love with the game. This is where the fantasy begins.” Make your last shot for falling, for failing, for learning from Jordan that reality is a place that has limits, and learning from yourself and your own stubborn and deeply human belief that fantasy is a place you can access when you dare to push beyond those limits.

Make your last shot for the kids being lied to, getting cut by coaches and being told to not worry because “Michael Jordan got cut too.” Make your last shot to remind them, to remind everyone, that the game does not end with the expiration of a clock, or a season, or a career, or by getting sent home on the last day of tryouts. The game does not end. It swirls, as reliable as the wind. There is always someone getting a shot up somewhere.

Beyond the arenas you reached for, there has always been the arena you’ve been given. Driveway, or playground, or trash can, or peach basket, or shoebox taped to the bedroom wall, balled up sock in your hands, five seconds left on the clock in your head, game on the line in your heart.

“This is where it all begins,” Michael Jordan and his magical playground taught you. “One kid alone on the playground. This is where you fall in love with the game. This is where the fantasy begins.”

5

Make your last shot for the trees. Before there were teams with fancy uniforms and matching sneakers, before there were coaches believing in lies and holding your fate in their hands and their clipboards, before there were games met with applause, there were games met by the trees, who had the ability to hold the game in light or in shadow. There was the wind, contesting shot after shot after shot, and blowing through the trees, bending branches and making noise like a crowd ebbs and flows through a game and the tensions it creates. There was the sky and the stars, illuminating every shot like stadium lights. Hundreds of millions of reminders lighting up every winter night. Who is to say a shot doesn’t become a star once it travels through the portal of the net. Not every star has been counted, and not every point has been recorded, and there’s something romantic and tragic about a ball in the air backdropped by a galaxy.

4

Make your last shot for the ghosts. For the ones who haunted you, but more so for the ones who held you. For 7th-Grade-You, freshly cut from the team and rolling through the paint right now to set a pick on the collective demons of the past playing defense. All 12 years and 110 pounds of ghostly, pointy, awkward, fearless-to-a-fault pre-teen swagger, ready to stand ground against an opponent with no face and no weaknesses.

“He can’t go left!” A demon shouts from the collective.

“Fuck that, take it to the left,” a voice that used to belong to you says to you. “I got the pick, you get the bucket, old man.”

3

Make your last shot for you, but first crossover the demons and the past in front of you. Fist bump 7th-Grade You on your way around the pick and drive to the baseline. Quick wave goodbye to every coach who cut you sitting courtside.

2

Make your last shot for the trees growing restless as the clock melts away. Make it from the spot you love so much. The same spot on the floor where KG hit that game-winner over Sheed in 2000 while you and your dad screamed from the stands.

Make it for you. Make it for KG too. Make your last shot for the shots that remain unmade. Make your last shot not just to walk off the court, but to walk back on it again and again. Make it for all the days you thought the game was telling you to go away and make it for the night you felt the game wrap its arms around you and tell you that right here is where you have always belonged.

1

It’s good if it goes! Your fingertips shout as the ball leaves your hand to meet the sky, and the stars, and the wind. Even all these years later you remember this is where you fall in love with the game. This is not only where the fantasy begins but where it continues. This is where you find the courage to take the shot and the courage to love yourself as much as you love the game. One kid alone on the playground and one shot alone in the sky. Time and space bent to stand still by one ball off one kid’s hand. A game is on the line and can’t be decided until the ball decides to come back down. No coach or G.O.A.T. taught you about the spirit of this moment, about the power in this practice, and no one could because this part of the game has never been for anyone else.

Entire worlds conjured and cratered in your motion, your belief, your ball, your rule. Will you have everything you need to walk off the court after this? Your fingertips told you so, but just like the G.O.A.T., they too speak in truths and in lies.

The ball reaches its peak, while your wrist is still snapped, your shooting hand reaching into an invisible cookie jar, which a coach or two did teach you about. This is the moment you step on the court for. This is the moment you come back to the court for. This is the moment when the ball’s ascension turns towards descent. You love the moment the ball goes in, but nothing is quite like the moment when it might go in. A moment of hope, optimism, clarity, love, a moment when the world divides in two, one world where there’s the ball in the air and another world where there’s everything else…

It’s good if it goes.

It’s good if it…

It’s good if—

It’s good.

It’s

…

Zero