What To Do With the Wall?
The official tossed the ball, supposedly straight but slightly sloping toward the visitors’ side of the half-court line. Our center, perched in the supreme ready position, her dominant arm crooked like a statue’s ready to unfurl and reach, took full advantage of the gift in an alien gym. Rising to meet the ball at the top of its flight, she tipped the leather prize toward our wide-eyed teammate who was posted-up on the edge of the circle, hand extended like a catcher’s mitt. The tip-off was soft and right on target. Our eager teammate pulled it in, then spun on her opposite foot, simultaneously pushing the ball off the floor in front of her as she raced toward the open goal. It only took two bounces to get to the rim where she cleanly kissed it off the glass for the first two points of the game.
The jam-packed gym went wild.
Peeling out on an arc from her full-speed finish back toward the other end of the court, she grinned full-toothed while pumping her right fist jubilantly in the air. Then she saw us—her four teammates and five opponents—clustered in an awkward stupor near the spot she had streaked away from only seconds before.
That’s when it hit her.
Original Image by Wyatt Determan (CC BY-SA 4.0)
No wonder nobody had chased her. She’d scored at the wrong goal.
As the officials tried to explain to the crew at the scorer’s table how to record what had just occurred, our crosstown rival student body had a field day with our malfunction.
They clap-clap, clap-clap-clapped their appreciation with an echoing euphoric chant of “Thank YOU! Thank YOU!” Their boisterous, unified delirium bounced off the concrete walls.
My teammate, joining our make-shift huddle near the top of the key, shouted to us over the reverberating roar, “Does this mean I have to score 12 to get to 10 tonight?”
Then she turned and Miss-America waived to the slobbering students before bowing like a Broadway performer to the unhinged crowd.
For the life of me, I can’t recall if we won or lost that game.
I have not, however-- and probably will never-- forget the way my teammate stuck her landing. Her recovery was an Olympic-level ten.
Things don’t always go the way we hope they will. Sometimes weird stuff happens. Things we couldn’t have predicted, never would have imagined, don’t have a playbook for how to deal with. Sometimes it’s simply uncanny, the self-imposed pickles we can put ourselves in.
When we run face first into a wall, the way we get around it says a lot about who we are.
Rarely is what happens as important as what we do about it when it does.