There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

by Hanif Abdurraqib

And besides, it might do all of us some good to reconsider what making it even means, or at least to honor a world where making it is not defined by the glamorous exit, not only by television cameras, not only by coming back with a pair of trophies riding shotgun. What, after all, do you call it when your name is good on every block you touch, or when kids gather around porches to hear stories of when you were great, even if you haven’t held a ball in a meaningful game in decades. When you don’t have to pay for a drink, when the guys at the corner store wave you off while you reach into your pockets. What do you call it when players who came after you fight back tears at the mere memory of you, at the mere mention of your life now, the path you made. Someone who ages, thank God. Someone who lives beyond their past selves. But someone who is also bronzed, a monument embedded in the emotional infrastructure of a place. People will remember you, sweat-slicked and twirling through two defenders, splitting the foolish ambitions of your enemies. People will remember you, swinging from a rim with your eyes wide open, as if you can’t believe that you got that high and can’t believe that you have to come down.