Basketball Fever

The basketball teams of two educational systems I associate with have progressed to high levels of tournament competition. The excitement is palpable.

Yesterday my whole school stopped in its tracks to listen over the intercom radio to the final three minutes of the close high school game. Students normally rowdy and inattentive in class quieted each other and concentrated fiercely, raising their eyes and arms to the tiled ceiling and muttering prayers of “Please, please.” When the home-town team won, cheering erupted throughout the school, and when we were finally dismissed for the delayed class change, students in the hallways jumped up and down and reminded each other, “We won!”

I heard one student say, “For the first time in my life, I’m proud to be from this town.”

Along a parallel vein, a practicum student observer of my classroom has kept me up-to-date with his college’s basketball team’s surprising ongoing success. “The whole campus is caught up in it,” he said. “Everyone’s excited.”

The sense of community surrounding these successes is mounting and enveloping. One teacher during my school’s morning announcements earlier this week notified everyone that that afternoon the police department would be escorting the team’s bus around town before the bus would head out for yesterday’s victory: “Come out and support our boys!” she said. And the nearby college emailed me yesterday to suggest I rally around a computer this coming weekend to join fans worldwide who will be watching and cheering on the team. Have a party, they said–and send us a picture (I’d maybe win a t-shirt).

So this weekend majestic things are supposed to happen. “The boys” will defend what’s good and right and just (us) by bouncing a piece of inflated leather on an expensive and finely-finished floor with clearly delineated lines and then throwing the ball into the air and (“Please, God, make it go in!”) through a circle of metal.

I can’t imagine doing or watching anything more important.