More than once this week, I felt like one of the hapless opponents swallowed up by the Fernley girls basketball team’s devastating half-court traps, left with nowhere to go, no open passing lanes and no good decisions left.
Much like those poor guards, all I could do was pivot, protect the ball and pray someone cut to the middle before I turned it over.
By midweek, even the simple stuff, the free throws of daily life, started clanging off the rim. By Thursday I was chasing rebounds I didn’t even know I’d missed, scrambling after loose ends the way a point guard dives after a 50-50 ball.
At one point, I’m pretty sure I got called for a technical foul because I was out of timeouts. And that was before the three-point shooting slump kicked in. Every idea I had all week hit the front of the rim.
Back in the days when I played ball every day, I used to tell opponents tossing up bricks, “You’re going to hurt someone shooting like that.” This week, I felt like the one in danger. If bad shots were hazardous materials, I would’ve needed a permit. Even my good ideas rattled around the rim a couple times before falling out. I could almost hear the whole gym groan.
By the time the week was over, I’d fully surrendered to basketball mode. Every errand felt like a road game. Every conversation sounded like a postgame interview. I even described a trip to the grocery store as “a good team effort.”
That’s when I realized I might need to sit myself down and regroup, maybe draw up a new play on the white board, or take the air out of the ball and run some clock.
But like basketball, life has a shot clock, and mine hit zero before I even got a decent look at the rim. The horn sounded, the possession ended, and that was that. But the nice thing about this game is that there’s always another one coming with a fresh clock, a clean inbound, and maybe, if I finally get my feet set, a swish.
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