Blessings and Thanksgiving On Our Sacred Day Of Hoops
We live in an amazing world. The spectre of nuclear holocaust hangs over Japan. Popular democratic uprisings have punched holes in decades-long totalitarian regimes in the Middle East, where this country maintains not one but two all-out wars. History is history. The present is wildly complex, and to the unsuspecting, terrifying.
Let us pause, then, and reflect. We have it pretty good, given the larger picture.
There are a bunch of basketball games to be played today. They will be played by reasonably amateur players. The wild hopes and aspirations of student bodies and larger fanbases will climb and crash with the dizzying insistence of a roller coaster. Tears of joy and of sorrow will be wept. Grown, professional men will dance like children, scream like siamangs. Fathers will call sons, daughters, mothers, and spread the gospel of some low-seed toppling a favorite. Across race and gender and region and politics, we will today enjoy that rarest of things: shared consciousness. And it won’t be about terrorism, or natural disaster, or religion, or anything so serious. We will all be thinking, buzzing about basketball. It’s cool.
