Freethrows

What isn’t like shooting freethrows? The more I think about it, almost everything feels like standing at the painted line, the ball in your hand, the ref’s whistle in his mouth, your teammates tensed, ready to lunge. The safety dribble: your little signature, your lucky pebble, your last second to yourself before the shot. The relief when the ball plunges through the net, as if following a drawn line; the jerk in your stomach if it bounces badly. The silence around the shot. The confidence you have to summon to shoot, a faith you know is manufactured, purely pragmatic: an economics strategy of managing expectations.

Or is everything like after a game? When it doesn’t matter anymore, and the janitor is wiping down the court for the next game, and the upcoming teams are starting their warm ups, and you and your teammates are sucking on water bottles, privately celebrating and mourning your achievements and screw-ups, and you’re unlacing your shoes, and examining your knee, where you got a bad floor burn, and thinking about what’s for dinner, and asking if anyone has seen your shampoo when you get to the locker room. Maybe everything is like that.