On my own for a couple of weeks, I’ve been finding things to do beyond my usual routines. Last night I went to watch the girls varsity basketball team from our local high school—Bethlehem Central—take on Troy in a playoff championship game.
I knew nothing about the team. I hadn’t followed them. Only through a quick pre-game search did I discover the Eagles had finished a weak regular season with a 7-11 record. I’m not sure how they made the playoffs.
In a previous playoff round, the Eagles upset top-ranked Columbia, a team they’d lost to in the regular season, and now they were facing Troy, a team they’d lost to twice during the season.
During warmups, a strange thing happened to me. I felt a rush behind my eyes, deep in my sinuses, a denseness in my chest. I was almost getting choked up. I had no idea why I was so emotional. I don’t think it was because Troy was a much bigger, sturdier, taller team, whereas the Eagles looked slight and lacked height. One of their starting guards was an eighth grader!
The teams warmed up with different styles. Troy ran layup and rebounding drills, but Bethlehem ran full-speed three-on-threes, with a tenacity that made me fear they were going to wear themselves out before the opening tipoff. (As if I knew anything about coaching and tactics.)
But then the game started and that tenacity came to play. The Bethlehem girls were relentlessly competitive on the court: fierce, intense, disciplined, determined. They caught Troy by surprise and jumped out to a 10-0 lead. The Eagles led by five at halftime, fell behind by eight in the fourth quarter, then surged and won 58-56 on a last-second shot to take home the championship trophy.
I’ve thought more about my emotional moment. I decided it had something to do with the forever-departed days when my own kids were in high school. They weren’t basketball players, but there were track meets, and hockey games, and band concerts, and theater performances. I went to them all. I had to see my kids participate and perform. Sometimes it went well, other times not, but these were formative moments, and some of those moments will stay in their memories for their lifetimes, and in mine. The practice and the preparation they all put in. These kids on the court, or on the track, or in the flute or French horn section—they were emerging, they were becoming, they were establishing who they are and who they would be in the years ahead.
Those girls giving everything they had in the final game, they were just kids. But I could almost see them transitioning to adults as I watched them play. It was beautiful and wistful. And what a game!
