Edenville Owls

Chapter 34

We played a bunch of preppies from the Phillips Country Day School. They were pretty slick. At the end of the first half they were beating us by ten points. They had a center as tall as Russell, and Russell wasn’t so good against people his size. Both their guards were better than I was. But they were all sucking air when the first half ended.

“Okay,” I said before the second half. “They’re probably better than us. But they’re in lousy shape. And we’re not.”

“So we run them,” Nick said.

“Every time we get the ball,” I said. “Run like hell. We throw the ball away some, we can live with that.”

“Defense?” Manny asked.

“Press,” I said. “All over the court. We’re in shape. They’re not. We give up a couple layups, we can live with that.”

“Besides,” Billy added, “it’s the only chance we got.”

“My man can’t keep up with me now,” Russell said. “By the time the game’s over, he’ll be puking on the floor.”

They won the tip to start the second half, and we surprised them with our press. So much so that one of their guards lost the ball out of bounds. We brought it in from the side and surprised them again. The whole first half we’d brought the ball up at a normal pace, looking to set up our weave, trying to set up some screens, trying to get Russell free of his man on a roll to the basket. This time Manny threw the ball in to me and I went full tilt up the court, running as hard as I could, in only about half control of my dribble. But it worked. I blew by everyone and laid the ball in. Then they took it in from the end line, and we stayed right up there with them. Face-to-face. Fighting them on every pass. Bothering them on every dribble. When we got the ball, all of us ran for their basket like a Chinese fire drill.

Occasionally we did lose the ball. I lost my dribble a couple of times. Nick threw it away once, trying to hit Russell. Manny got a rebound and threw it the length of the court to Billy but overthrew it. On defense sometimes, one of their guys would break past one of us and go in to score.

But as the half moved on, we also began to get layups, and they began to lose the ball more and more. Hurried passes. Double dribbles. Bad shots. Russell was getting to the basket ahead of his man and getting layups. Phillips took all their time-outs, and when they came back, we were right up against them again. We’d played with only five guys the whole season. All of us were tired. But none of us were exhausted. The Phillips guys looked like all they wanted to do was go sit down.

With two minutes left in the game, we were tied and they ran out of gas. We scored the last eight points while they sort of walked up the floor after us. When the buzzer sounded, they all did go right to the bench and sat on it, heads hanging, gasping for breath, too tired even to shake hands or tell us we were just lucky.

We weren’t lucky. We were in shape.