There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

by Hanif Abdurraqib

I am from Columbus, Ohio, which means that even when I was a kid of eight years old, I knew wasn’t nobody in my city fucking with that school in Ann Arbor,

And listen, ain’t that a kind of love? To say You are worthy of the time it takes to dismantle you.

Convenience is also mistaken for something a little bit like love, or a lot like love, depending on what is at stake, and what part of a life is being made easier.

I propose, once again, that you are, in part, who loves you.

I’ve never been more afraid than I have been curious

can tell you about guys who didn’t hoop to get away from the streets, or to get out of anywhere. Guys who hooped because they wanted to be respected on the streets they loved. They wanted to make themselves infamous in the place that held them, and that, too, is a type of making it.

Don’t talk to me about any version of making it that ends with someone like Estaban Weaver being described as a failure. Not if you weren’t here. Not if you don’t know what it’s like for a city to make you into a savior before you finish ninth grade. Not if, despite that, you survived.

With enough repetition, anything can become a religion. It doesn’t matter if it works or not, it simply matters that a person returns.

Yeah, we could take this motherfucker apart brick by brick, but then we’d have more bricks than hands willing to rebuild anything, and ain’t that the way of it.

And I’m from Ohio, which means everyone I roll with from this godforsaken state dreams themselves an underdog. Me and my whole crew embrace this flyover shit.

Understand this: some of our dreams were never your dreams, and will never be.