Captain, play your actual game #2
“Thank you. I learned it from my boyfriend.” She puts her arm back over her eyes. “Go win your thing.”
I'm dressed nine minutes earlier than I need to be, and for the first time in four years I don't go downstairs.
The walk-through can have me at ten. Not one minute before.
————
Eighteen.
That's the number when I finally understand what is being done to us. I don’t exactly panic, but fuck me.
Harvard is up eighteen with four minutes left in the first half, and their band has started playing something jaunty.
Sixteen hundred and thirty-six seats. That's the entire building.
Smallest gym in this league by a distance. Ours holds nearly seven thousand. And Harvard has put every single one of those sixteen hundred people in two banks along the sidelines, close enough that I can hear individual sentences.
No seats behind the baskets. Nothing to shoot into but a wall of crimson and a skylight, because this place was built in ancient history and somebody decided a roof made of glass was a good idea.
So at four in the afternoon in March there is actual daylight coming down onto the floor to make sure everyone can see the eighteen properly.
Nobody outside this conference will watch a second of this. There is no national feed. The whole thing is going out on a stream with a scoreboard graphic somebody built in a spreadsheet.
Two banners hang over the far basket with the last three seasons on them.
I told a locker room once that you have to be good when everyone is watching and good when nobody is.
Sixteen hundred and thirty-six people.
So clearly, nobody is watching.
Their six is a senior nobody scouts and he has hit three from the top of the key.
Leon is a half-step late on every switch because he read those banners in the warm-up and I let him.
And I have taken eleven shots.
Eleven. In sixteen minutes. Because they went up six and I decided I would go and get it, personally, the way I have gone and got it personally since I was nine years old.
The problem is Harvard’s whole defence has spent this afternoon waiting for me to do exactly that and quietly thanking God every single time.
DJ jogs past me on a dead ball. “Cap.”
“I know.”
“You don’t.”
“DJ—”
“You've got two guys on you every possession and Rory's been alone in that corner for ninety fucking seconds.” He doesn't slow down. “Just checking.”
He’s not checking. Domenico James Valenti does not check. Ever. He’s fucking warning me.
His tone sounds like it’s the last warning, too.
Halftime horn. Twenty-eight, forty-four.
There's a cut over my left eyebrow that nobody can account for and my shirt is wet through to the number on the back of it.
Harvard's band plays us off. Somebody in the front bank has learned my mother's maiden name from somewhere and is using it.
“You are the best passer in this conference and you have taken eleven shots in the last competitive half of basketball you will ever play.” Coach caps his pen and points it at me. “Play your actual game or I sit you, and neither of us wants that in Boston.”
Told you the man is at his most dangerous when he doesn’t raise his voice and goes straight for the throat. No bullshit anywhere in it.
I like that about Coach, even when it aims at me.
Three more things about spacing then twenty seconds of nothing at all.
Nate stands up, which nobody asked him to do, and says, “Also they're all really short,” and the whole locker room breaks, and something loosens across nine faces at once. I think, not for the first time, that the most useful man in this program has never taken a shot that mattered.
I get up. “Rory. You've been open all day and I haven't looked at you once. That's on me and it stops now.” I get my hands on Leon's shoulders. “And you. Stop reading the ceiling.”
“I wasn’t—”
“You were. It's fine. It's a nice ceiling.” I let go. “They're going to keep sending two at me. Every time they do it, one of you is standing somewhere with nobody near you. That's the whole second half. That's it.”
I would love to tell you we came out and took charge. Or at least we played dirty, because that would be the only way we could win this fucking championship.
But Harvard scores.
Then Harvard scores again.
Their six hits a fourth from the top of the key and the crimson bank comes up onto its feet and stays there, and with seventeen minutes left in my Princeton uniform we are down twenty.
Twen-fucking-ty.
Nate looks at me. All of them look at me.
So I go and have a conversation. Not with my team. With their six.
I pick him up on the next dead ball, close enough that nobody else hears it, and I tell him he's the best player on this floor. That nobody at this school has any idea, and that if he's still in this league next year he should ask somebody why.
All of it true. Every word.
He looks at me like a man being handed something he has wanted for four years.
I don't know if it’ll work until the next possession.
It does. Next possession he takes it himself instead of moving it. So does the one after. Their offence, which had been a machine for twenty-three minutes, five men, no ego anywhere in it, quietly becomes one senior with something to prove and four men standing around watching him have it.
Passing does something they haven't accounted for.
When you move it, they have to guard everybody. When they guard everybody, they can't put two on me. There's a specific look a man gets when he works out that no help is coming. I have seen it a lot. I'm about to see it four or five more times.
And with one man on me, I am, and I say this with real humility, a problem.
Rory hits from the corner. Down seventeen.
I come off Leon's screen and their guard is a half-step late and I take the first shot I've wanted all day, and it's not close to the rim, it just goes in.
Fifteen.
DJ strips their eighteen at the elbow, Leon runs, Nate finishes. Thirteen.
Rory again. Corner. Ten, and their band has stopped playing.
I don't say anything for two minutes. I don't need to. I put a hand up, two fingers, and Rory moves eight feet to his left. I tap the back of my head and DJ switches.
I bring it up slow, one hand, chin down.
Eight.
Six, eleven minutes left, and this gym has changed key.
Then I foul, from a stupid reach on a drive I did not need to contest. The official’s arm goes up and the number four goes up on the table and Coach puts both hands on top of his head.
Four fouls with ten minutes and forty seconds left on the clock.
Coach knows he can’t sit me. I know it. The front bank knows it.
And most importantly, Harvard knows it.
They come at me four straight possessions.
Not their guard. Their six, the one I told he was the best player on this floor, which he has apparently decided to prove at me. And he goes right into my chest every time, because I cannot put a hand on him and we both understand that perfectly.
He scores.
He fucking scores again.
He gets Leon on the switch and scores a third time, and I am standing there with both arms in the air like a man being arrested, and the noise in that building has developed a shape.
Down twelve. Six minutes.
Somebody in the front bank yells at me to sit down.
Coach calls it.
Twenty-nine seconds, all five of us breathing like animals, and he does not draw a single play.
“Leon.”
“Coach.”
“You've got the six. Not Mercer. You.”
Leon's head comes up. “He's got twenty-six points.”
“He's got twenty-six points because he's been guarded by a man who can't foul.” Coach looks at him steadily. “You've been late all afternoon and you know it. Fix it in six minutes.”
Leon’s eyes go to the banners.
I snap my fingers once, an inch from his face, and he stops.
“Yeah,” he says. “Got it.”
Leon does not let that man touch the ball for four minutes.
I have watched Leon play for three years and I have never seen this.
On him at the inbound. On him through two screens.
Chest to chest, hands off, absolutely nothing available, and their senior starts making a face about it and then starts making a noise about it, which is when I know we've got him.
We score. They don't. We score.
Seven.
Five, two minutes twelve, and this building has gone genuinely strange, because half of it is standing and none of it is making any sound.
Their guard misses. The ball comes off the front of the iron at a stupid angle into a crowd of four.
And Nate Whitmore: twenty-eight points all season, framed a receipt once, carried a girl's bag through a hotel lobby this morning and said nothing about it; gets two hands on it and puts it straight back through.
Three. Forty-four seconds.
Nate screams something at the crimson bank that I will be apologising for in writing.
Harvard inbounds.
DJ reads it before it happens, the way DJ reads everything, and takes it clean off their guard at half court. Ball loose. I get it. Rory is in that corner where he has lived all afternoon.
He does not hesitate for a fraction of a second.
Tied.
Twenty-eight seconds. Sixteen hundred people in a building with a glass roof making no sound whatsoever.
They don't call timeout either.
Their six gets it at the top and drives at Leon, and Leon is perfect. Feet set, hand high, chest turned, no contact.
There is no contact.
There is no contact and the official blows his whistle anyway, and puts his fist on his hip, and points at Leon.
The crimson bank detonates. Leon puts both hands over his face. Coach comes six feet onto the floor and gets warned for it, and I get an arm across his chest and walk him backwards while he says several things about that official's eyesight.
Two shots. Nineteen seconds.
Harvard six makes the first.
He misses the second.
Down one. Nineteen seconds.