Cameron (1) and Sydney Van Dyke (13) share a moment with a rival basketball player who is a softball teammate. (Grant Van Dyke photo)
It began with the unmistakable sound of squeaking shoes and basketballs thunking rhythmically off the hardwood and ended with hugs and shared popsicles.
All accompanied by much high-pitched screaming, a little giggling, and some dramatically swung elbows.
The Coupeville Middle School gym was a place both of the moment, and out of time, Wednesday afternoon as one season swung to a close and another stepped forward to claim our attention.
Next week brings the first “spring sports” games to the prairie, and we, the few, the brave, the foolhardy, will be buffeted by wind, rain, dust storms, and possibly snow.
Hunched over, trying to track the flight of softballs through the clouds, hear the crack of baseballs popping into catcher’s mitts, or focus on tennis balls thwapping against wet rackets, we will curse the sports gods.
Loudly and often.
As coaches check to see if our school’s track and field athletes are just resting, or forever frozen in place, we will remember a time when we were warm.
When we sat in a gym, where, no matter how hard the bleachers might be, we were witness to God’s Chosen Sport.
Basketball was here to bewitch us, for a glorious moment or two, and we were fulfilled.
And then the doors slammed, and we were sent onto the frozen tundra, possibly to see Jodie Foster stumble by, still trying to piece together the mysteries left unanswered by True Detective: Night Country.
Or, at least it will feel that way, as one by one, our limbs go into hibernation.
But Wednesday, for two hours, all was well in the universe.
Brooklyn Pope was fighting Finley Helm for rebounds, Kaleigha Millison rampaged from end to end, pouring in buckets, and Claire Lachnit and Hazel Goldman unleashed their inner Wolf, playing defense the only way they know.
Full tilt and ready to rip your knees off, bless their fiery hearts.
Some will tell you the game didn’t ultimately matter in the grand scheme of things.
It wasn’t against another school but was an intra-squad scrimmage between Coupeville Middle School’s #3 and #4 teams.
The win or loss doesn’t go on anyone’s record, the points tallied (by me at least, since there was no official scorekeeper) don’t count in the season totals.
To which I say, if you feel that way, you’re a freakin’ moron and your mom should have done a better job raising you.
Basketball ALWAYS matters. ALWAYS.
It is the one pure sport, and Wednesday was our final moment in the cathedral.
From here on out, we’ll watch other sports, which all have their good points, and we’ll suffer immensely while following those which are playing far too early in the calendar year.
But we will be like Adam and Eve, post-apple, thrown out of paradise and left to wander, at least until basketball returns next winter.
So those who were there Wednesday — the handful of parents and fellow students, the trash-talking babies (“play some dang defense and get me a bottle!!”), the high school players doubling as the year’s best ref crew, the gym rats and lifers — we marinated in every second as it ticked off the clock.
When he’s not fighting fires, Jerry Helm builds basketball players. Is this the path to sainthood?? (Photo by JohnsPhotos.net)
The Wolves on the floor were the present and the future wrapped in one, young women bursting with potential.
Some will stay with the chosen sport (yay!), others will fall from the pure religion (boo!) as they wind their way through middle and high school.
Always, the questions linger.
Will one of these girls shoot up to six-foot-five, develop a killer post move, and bring Cow Town its first state title?
Or settle for being 5-4, but mature into the kind of defensive dynamo who looks like she’ll chop your knees off with a rusty machete?
Which might fulfill my dream of seeing the Detroit Piston Bad Boys reborn as braid-rockin’ prairie powerhouses.
Especially if Coupeville adopts my other dream of having its players enter the gym under the cover of darkness, a spotlight picking up each enforcer as Welcome to the Jungle wails on the soundtrack.
“You’re gonna dieeeeeeeeeee!!!!!”
Sweet dreams are made of this…
I’m saying, I look at these Wolves, and I believe they can be the kind of young women who help granny cross the street and get straight A’s, then go out and (metaphorically) slash some tires and burn the gym down.
Will Cameron Van Dyke and Selah Rivera be those Valkyries? Perhaps Priya Powell and Ava Alford.
Could be, or could be any from the group on the floor, be it an Emma (Cushman or Green) an Anna (Annaliese Powers or Annabelle Cundiff) or a Zayne (Roos) or Zariyah (Allen).
Toss in Marina Flood, Addison Jacobson, Isley Garcia Fernandez, and Cassandra Powers and CMS coaches Bennett Richter and Jerry Helm had plenty of scrappers to turn wild Wednesday.
It’s why the two squads fought through four ties, the final one coming midway through the third quarter, before Team #3, which got twice the practice time of Team #4 this season, pulled away late for a 24-13 win.
Ten of 19 girls scored, with Millison rattling the rim for a game-high 10 points (at least according to my books), while Roos banked in six.
Ultimately, though, it wasn’t the score which mattered most.
It was getting to be in the gym one more time, feeling the ball lift off their fingertips, hearing their teammates, including the ones operating the scoreboard, scream in support.
It was a last afternoon in the cathedral, the sun peeking through the windows on the door, two teams running wild with refs who let the action play out.
It was basketball, and it was beautiful.
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