Release the kraken
Our ball.
Rory outlets to me and I take it up the right side. My legs left about four minutes ago. Nobody in this building needs to know that, least of all the man in front of me.
Sixteen hundred people stand up at once, and Coach doesn't call anything. He just puts one hand out flat at his hip. It's yours.
Fifteen.
I know what I do here. I have known since I was nine.
If there are nineteen seconds left in a one-point game, I take the ball to the rim. Because if it goes wrong it goes wrong on me, and there is nothing in my body that has ever wanted it any other way. Every close game. My hands, my shot, my problem.
Harvard defence knows that too. All five of them come at me.
Nine. Their best on-ball guy picks me up at the arc.
Seven. Their centre steps up off the block, and the whole floor bends towards me the way it always does.
Which leaves the back of the defence wide open like somebody forgot to close a door.
Five.
Mason on the right wing. Nobody within nine feet of him, because there is not one person alive in this building who believes I am going to pass.
And I open my mouth and I scream. “KRAKEN!”
Mason's head comes up.
Somewhere four rows behind our bench, a girl in a Princeton hoodie makes a sound I will be hearing for the rest of my life.
Mason goes backdoor.
Their centre reads it half a second late, because he's still looking at me. All five of them are still looking at me. I put the ball through a gap the size of a doorway. One hand. No look at all.
Mason catches it under the rim.
Off the glass.
The horn goes while the ball is still coming down through the net and sixteen hundred people in crimson make the specific sound of a building being switched off.
Seventy-fucking-four Princeton to seventy-three Harvard.
Nate lands on my back with his entire body weight, screaming directly into my ear canal. Then Leon. Then DJ, who does not do this, who has never once done this, and I go down under all of it onto Harvard's floor with somebody's elbow in my mouth.
The eyebrow has opened again. I find that out later, from a photograph.
Two hundred and sixteen thousand minutes of film. Two ankles. One knee I have never mentioned to a trainer. Every morning at seven, on time, whether I wanted to or not. My father on a tailgate explaining that being upset is not a plan.
And the last thing I ever do in this building is give somebody else the ball.
I would like to tell my nine-year-old self about that. I don't think he'd take it well.
The handshake line is not good.
Two of them won't look at anybody. Their guard says something to Rory that gets Rory turned around by DJ.
Their six is the last one down the line. He stops in front of me. “Good game.”
“It was true.” I shake his hand long enough to see one corner of his mouth go up.
Then it's the table and the medals, and a man from the conference reads names into a microphone that isn't working properly, and when they put that thing over my head I have to look at the floor for a second.
I have wanted this since I was fifteen years old. I have wanted it in an ice bath at six in the morning and on a bus to Providence and every single time somebody told me Princeton doesn't win things any more.
It is exactly as good as I thought it would be.
Nobody tells you it’s allowed to be exactly as good.
Coach receives the trophy the way a man receives a parcel he was expecting, turns it over once to check the base of it for reasons known only to him, and hands it straight to Nate.
Nate lifts it the way it is supposed to be lifted. Both arms. Full extension. Screaming.
We’re all screaming.
And then a man in a polo shirt wheels out a stepladder. Yep. After everything, there is a ladder, and a pair of scissors, and you climb up in front of everybody and cut a piece of string off a basket.
Seniors first. I go first. I have wanted this specific forty seconds since I was fifteen.
I climb up, cut my strand, then come down and don't put it in my pocket.
Maddy is on the floor. Obviously, my girlfriend is on the floor. There is a barrier and a steward and a written policy, yet she is standing right there, on the wood with mascara down one side of her face.
She’s got my Princeton hoodie on over the funeral grey skirt she’s been wearing since ten to eight this morning. And I think it’s only now that I work out that she did not put it on for me.
Maddy’s got a knee-length grey skirt on because she knew my father was going to be here.
I go over, and she opens her mouth to say something enormous, and I put the net in her hand and close her fingers around it.
“That's yours.”
“Will—”
“Don't argue with me about it in front of Harvard.”
She looks at the piece of string in her fist and then up at me and cannot get a single word out, which is now twice in one day. I am definitely counting.
Mason is at the back of the line with his hands on his hips, waiting like a junior, because he is one.
I walk towards him and hold the scissors out.
“Cap, it's seniors—”
“Take them.”
“That's not how—”
“Mason.” I put them in his hand. “Next year it's yours anyway. Might as well practise.”
He stands there holding a pair of scissors and looking at me, and for a second I think he's going to say something we would both have to live with afterwards.
“You went right off the second screen,” he smirks at me. “Twice.”
Little bastard.
I laugh and clap his shoulder. “I know.”
He climbs the ladder.
Fifteen minutes later Leon has appointed himself director of a photograph he is also standing in, which is not a thing a person can do, and is doing it anyway. It takes four attempts. Rory checks his hair between each one.
DJ does not smile in any of them. Not one. Somewhere in a Princeton hallway there is going to be a photograph of nine men screaming, and DJ standing among them like a man waiting for a bus.
I'll still be laughing at him when it arrives.
We get a seed and a bracket and a flight to somewhere in the Midwest in eleven days, and one game against a team ranked four spots above us, and then it's over.
Eleven days. Then this room stops existing.
Nate's going to Japan in June. I'm going to London. Mason gets this team. DJ gets a graduate programme and a very quiet life he's going to love.
I look across the floor at Maddy. She's got her chin down and the net in her fist like it’s the best thing she’s been given.
Three months.
I don't say it. She doesn't say it. We've both been not saying it since a yard in February. And tonight is not the night.
The student account gets me by the tunnel, because of course it does. Sophomore called Dev, phone on a gimbal, Princeton cap, eleven hundred people watching live.
Nobody is watching, I said.
Eleven hundred. A figure he gives me twice before he asks a question, and once more during it.
“Cap. Ivy champions. In their building.”
“In their building.” I hear how I sound and don't correct it. “So nobody gets to say we had home-court advantage this year. This one's actually ours.”
Dev grins. “Speaking of home-court advantage.”
Oh, come on.
“What about personally?”
And that's it. Twenty-two years of always having something to say and my mouth simply stops working.
“I don't—” Nothing. Nothing at all. “I don't think I had any advantage on that particular front.”
“You live in the same house.”
“Living in the same house only makes it longer,” Nate talks for me, arriving from off-camera with no invitation whatsoever. “She gets to see his bed hair. She's seen him be cranky about a fridge.”
“And how sad dinner is,” Mason adds, “when there's unseasoned chicken.”
“How do you know about the chicken.” I turn to Mason.
Mason only shrugs while Nate is having the best afternoon of his life.
“Honestly,” I turn back to the camera and tell Dev and fucking eleven hundreds people watching, “all it got me was finding out that if it were ever on the table, my girlfriend would pick Will Turner over me.”
Dev's face twists. “Who the fuck is Will Turner?”
And behind the phone, past the steward, Maddy Fairfax is standing there with her mouth open in genuine horror, or embarrassment, I haven’t exactly worked out yet. Her blue eyes glare at me so sharp I shut up in two seconds.
Frankly, I need my neck intact to play the next game.
“Damn right,” Nate grins to the camera. “Captain lost to an unemployed blacksmith.”
“Last one.” Dev turns the phone. “Anything you want to say to Princeton?”
And I could.
I've got eleven hundred people and a live feed and eight seconds, and I have had a paragraph loaded for weeks about spreadsheets and cold emails and who actually built what and who has never once been handed anything.
Maddy's watching me over the top of the phone with her arms folded and one eyebrow up.
I’ve decided it is not mine to give. “I'm proud of her,” I hear the smile in my own voice.
Dev waits. “...Of the team?”
“Yeah. Them too.” I hand the phone back, which I don't believe you're allowed to do. “Can I go? I'd like to go find my girlfriend.”
My father reaches me at the scorer's table with his coat over one arm before I get to her.
He's been at the edge of this for twenty minutes waiting for the crowd to thin, because he will not push through people. Never has.
“Dad.”
He puts his hand out. I shake it, because that's what Mercers do.
“Good pass.”
Two words.
I wait for the rest. There is always a rest of it. Second quarter, twice. You did it against Rutgers. Fix it before—
Nothing comes this time.
He stands there in a Harvard gymnasium with his coat over his arm, nodding slightly, watching a bunch of boys in uniform giving it another go at group photos.
“Good pass,” he says again. A beat. “Where are we eating?”
Behind him, four rows up, one seat remains empty.
I look at it for about as long as it takes to look at an empty seat.
Then Maddy gets both arms around my middle from somewhere off my left and says something into my chest that sounds a great deal like can I lick your medal, and Nate is explaining the blacksmith to a steward, and Coach is shaking hands with a man from London.
My mother will text me about this tonight, or tomorrow morning when she's out of a meeting.
Either way, that’s not what I’m working out tonight.
I get an arm around my girlfriend and turn to my father.
“Somewhere with a lot of food,” I tell him. “Nate's coming.”