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It was a vapid, cold morning, the type of morning on which you make the same drive every day and can barely remember anything of significance about how you got there. You somehow just end up where you expected to be. Later that night, we would have practice, possibly the last one of the year, but you don’t really try to think that much about that kind of stuff.
I took a big sigh and said, “I hope I’m enjoying it enough,” as I pushed the truck past another droll red light, acknowledging how fast it all flies by. When it seems like just yesterday, you were still peeling off a jersey and now you’re in a collared shirt trying to convince kids half your age to grab the brass ring as long as they can.
That night, one of the parents of the kids I coach came up to me as it was ending. He said that by age 13, we’ll have spent a staggering 90 percent of the face-to-face time with our children that we will spend in our entire lifetime. He said he didn’t believe it when he first read it, but it ended up being true. He offered proof if I didn’t believe him. I did.
The man told me to take a mental picture and put it away forever, because it goes fast, and you’re going to want to remember it. It was almost like the guy was peering into my soul on that drive in the morning when I mouthed that to myself to no one in particular. How else could a person have the same internal conversation that it engaged in with another person later that day? Somewhere, someone was telling me something.
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Eric Church is a country singer. He has this song that came out late last year called “Talladega.” The lyrical story is about friends having to enter that stage of growing up, and enjoying one last summer together. They fire up his dad’s old Winnebago and haul ass on down to Talladega, the legendary Alabama race track.
In the lyrics, Church is looking back on that summer, that trip, as if it was a place he goes back to when he needs something to feel happy… and the bottom of a bottle isn’t going to do the trick this time. Music has a way of explaining things with other people’s words that other stuff just can’t mouth, including our own thoughts.
We all probably have our Talladega, be it a race track, a watering hole, an empty lake where, by God, only you know where the fish like to bite. For some of us, it’s March, and specifically, it’s Madness.
March is a Thursday afternoon, when every game is decided by one possession, one point, one moment, so much that it feels like it’s scripted — it’s that good.
It’s JayVaughn Pinkston of Villanova so destroyed that his Talladega was over, he couldn’t even show his face walking off the court after a loss to N.C. State, tears hiding in a jersey that will fade into memories. That jersey will never be worn in that same limelight again. Pinkston’s pain was poignantly accompanied by the tears of a school band member — “Villanova Piccolo Girl” — who was somehow equally torn up over it all.
It’s Iowa State’s Abdel Nader, face in hands, understanding the gravity of a loss while the juxtaposition of the team that would end his season (UAB) is hugging out the improbable on the court.
It’s Roy Williams, all 64 years of him, hooting and hollering in a locker room like he’s 17.
It’s euphoria and it’s heartbreak, seen strewn along the faces of once-undefeated teenagers chasing down the ghosts of history and coming up two doors short; it’s Frank Kaminsky of Wisconsin on hands and knees, weeping into his shirt the way you do only when you’ve lost something you desperately love; it’s his teammate, Sam Dekker, doing the same on the lonely walk back with everyone else on the team to the locker room after Monday night’s championship-game loss to Duke.
For all of us, our Talladega — wherever it is — ends, damn it, and there’s nothing you can do from keeping Father Time from outrunning it all. Yet, at the same time, you can be damn happy you were there in the first place.
But maybe … more than baskets, wins, losses, last-second shots, or upsets, March is about something else. Maybe it’s about basketball, sure, the way we all have our places we go when we need to forget the moment and soak in the past. Maybe it’s about a kid named R.J. Hunter playing ball for his pops, hitting a last-second shot to win on the grandest of college basketball’s stages, and hugging his hobbled old man in the process … one last win before one last loss and the tears that go with the erosion of time, the tears that come with that 90 percent being in the home stretch.
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Ninety percent by 13-years-0ld.
We all can’t be Ron Hunter and his kid. For the rest of us, it flies by, hoping you either enjoyed it enough to remember or trapped it enough on film to look back on whether you did or not. As with anything else, Father Time rips away reality, reminding us that the moments we love don’t last forever.
Wherever it is, in a ball and hoop or something else, go find your own March. Go there when you need it. Go where you made the memories they’ll bury you with, because they cannot take those away. March Madness … every year … it’s an unbelievable time for us basketball junkies, great players or mediocre also-rans like myself.
It goes quickly, and then you pass it on if you’re lucky.
The next day after that conversation with that parent, our team lost. It was over. You promise yourself you won’t break down because you’ve done it enough where time should plant calluses on the moments of failure, but when you see guys tearing up because they love it as much as you did, it breaks you a bit.
Your Talladega doesn’t need to be anywhere in particular, but if you want, you can join us in March. There will never be another three weeks in sports so captivating, so encompassing, so “secretary in the office to college basketball junkie” loved such as this event. The power of sports is that it can bring us all together, but does so very rarely. There will never be another three weeks in sports like this. Well, until next year.
Ninety percent by 13 years, and that’s your reality. Take a mental picture of your March, wherever that place may be. It doesn’t need to be a driveway where your dreams are a shot away or under the lights in a city cage or college gym, where for those moments nothing else matters. It can be anywhere. It’s your canvas, your mental picture.
And your One Shining Moment can last forever, if you just dare to snap it in time.
