There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

by Hanif Abdurraqib

I haven’t found many things I love as much as I love the sound of a basketball game in a park going down to its tense and silent closing moments with a sky just beyond sunset. Players on the court too worn down to even talk shit anymore. Nothing but breath and the echo of flimsy metal, bending as a ball spins off the rim, signaling a game that, mercifully, won’t end just yet. Parents who came to the park swearing that they’d drag their children home now at the edge of the blacktop, as in awe as everyone else, becoming children again themselves, praising the heavy legs that leave the shots flat, praising the fouls that don’t get called through a forest of swinging hands, praising the rebounds that slip through fingers and the passes that don’t twirl off the hands with the same joyous shouts that they did just a few hours earlier.