The Last Days of Winter

a salty salute

I closed out March the way I opened it: not sleeping much. My Garmin Forerunner tells me that after meeting my sleep goals around 85% in January and February I’m about an hour in the negative in the month of March. I dragged myself out of bed, made enough coffee to kill a small animal, and drove to church to usher our Easter service. Beautiful as ever, the renewal of life in the face of death.

Mostly it was a beautiful day to begin with. 77 degrees, sunny, a good breeze. The first hot days of the year. It won’t last forever; it never does.

Pictured: false spring #1 of 3

But the hope is what keeps you going. There’s never a bad thing about staying hopeful, after all. It beats defeatism. That is sort of the whole point of Easter, I gather, at least as I know it. That and eggs.

I saw a lot of people before and after, and all anyone wanted to talk about was either the flowers in the sanctuary or The Game. A lack of nerves, possibly because of a lack of sleep, led me to be fine talking about either. Rarely is that the case, because frequently for the biggest of big games I am a hyperventilating mess even if I don’t show it publicly. But for whatever reason, on these first days of spring, I felt fine. Whatever happens, happens. And so it was, and so it went.

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Tennessee died as they lived: scrapping in a bar fight with glass shards sticking out of their bodies, bleeding everywhere, but refusing to go down or to calmly step into the ambulance.

What could have devolved into a beatdown or a very annoying show was instead a remarkable basketball game. The two best players in college basketball went at it for 40 minutes, matching bucket for bucket in completely different ways. They combined for 77 points. The rest of the players on the court between the two rosters combined for 61. I have lived for 30.5 years, and many a person reading this has lived for longer. I have never seen anything like yesterday’s 1-on-1 battle in a game of that much importance.

The entire season was kind of like that. I have lived for 30.5 years, and I had never seen anyone in a Tennessee uniform do the things Dalton Knecht had done. It was as if new miracles were revealed to me weekly. An excellent showing against Michigan State in an exhibition game felt like an indication that Tennessee had a pretty good, borderline All-American player. A 24-point outing against Wisconsin seemed to confirm it. A 37-point outing versus North Carolina suggested the SEC Player of the Year.

A brief lull in December and early January due to an ankle injury belied what was to come. 28, 36, 39, 25, 32, and 31 points in a six-game stretch. 39 in an SEC title race eliminator with Auburn, the greatest single-game performance I have ever seen by anyone at Tennessee. 40 in a Senior Day loss to Kentucky. 26 to deliver a Sweet Sixteen win over Creighton. Then this, 37 points in a tight defeat with the second-best team in America.

Knecht was not alone. Zakai Zeigler leveled up into a star. Jonas Aidoo, prior to a late-season swoon, was a legitimate All-SEC piece. Super-seniors Josiah-Jordan James and Santiago Vescovi took back seats and reduced roles but continued to make winning plays wherever they could. Jahmai Mashack continued to build into the best individual defender I have ever seen at Tennessee. Jordan Gainey wasn’t just a coach’s son; he was a legitimate contributor who kept Tennessee alive in a damned Elite Eight game. And then there was Tobe Awaka, an uncontrollable bulldozer on both ends.

These were the eight players who played in every game they were available for. I will remember them all for a long time, particularly as members of this specific roster. Some careers are not over, but some are. We may never see a team quite as enjoyable as this one was at Tennessee for a long time, a unique group of goofballs who truly loved one another. Even the bench pieces that rarely got in became fan favorites in their own right, with JP Estrella going to war against Zach Edey and Cameron Carr coming out of nowhere to hit a crucial three in the Sweet Sixteen.

The season’s end is usually a cruel thing, but for whatever reason I didn’t feel sad after the game ended like I did in 2018 or 2019 or 2022. There’s no real shame in losing to a better team, no shame in being one of the last eight teams standing. It felt like they squeezed as much juice out of the lemon as they possibly could have, and they went down with blood and guts spilling from the floor. They went down on their terms. Those are terms I can respect.

There was no sadness over the result itself, mostly sadness that I don’t get to see this particular group play another game together. They were fun, they won a lot of games, they got a new shiny trophy, and they can now go down as the best team in school history. Seasons have ended in far crueler fashion than that.

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We got home from a watch party and decompressed for a bit last night. I watched the end of the Duke/NC State game, then went outside. This weekend had the first hot days of the year, meaning 75+ degrees and sunny. I went for a long run Saturday morning and there were so many people out. It was a lovely Easter weekend, but by demands of job and sport I spent most of it inside. When it’s winter this isn’t a big deal, but when it’s warm out I feel a bit reclusive.

We bought this house a little under two years ago now, near my wife’s school. It had a lot of things we liked and some we didn’t, but one thing it has is a basketball goal. The previous owner or owners installed it but it’s way too close to the house itself. I have to step off into the grass to shoot threes on a goal that is more like 10.5 feet than 10 to begin with. When the ball caroms off the wrong way it bounces off the roof. I busted one of our gutters with a particularly bad brick once. It is imperfect.

I love it despite the imperfections. It’s right here in my backyard. I grew up with an imperfect goal of my own in my childhood driveway, one that was broken and wouldn’t go up to 10 feet. It topped out at around 9.25, which meant if I got a good enough jump I could grip the rim. Every time a thunderstorm happened it would fall over despite pouring sand into the base. By the time I graduated high school the rim was permanently bent upwards. In contrast, this one has yet to fall down, so hey.

I spent a lot of days, a lot of nights, a lot of time on that goal. It was always there, and our garage light was good enough to play after dark. In a small town where neither of our neighbors had houses all that close to ours, I was never worried about noise. It was just me and the ball, me and the ball. Today we have neighbors, and I have to be relatively polite because they have kids and responsibilities. And our retired neighbor probably wouldn’t love a lot of noise.

I got out there and shot until I couldn’t follow the ball well anymore. It wasn’t out of frustration; I just wanted to be outside. I shot and shot and shot, and I shot some more. I thought about the season as a whole, all of the good things, all of the bad. I thought about being locked inside by snow and ice for a week. Writing through the flu, followed by pneumonia. Training for a marathon. Also, a day job. I have burned down the candle at both ends this year and gritted through it, but the simple pleasure of a midrange jumper that goes down is perhaps the best relief one can have.

I looked around. There were leaves on the trees again, there were blooms. There was a sunset, a breeze, the smell of mowed grass. I stopped for a minute to take it in. It was springtime again. A beautiful thing, the changing of seasons, the clearing of clouds, the reminder of hope. It comes every year, and every year it still hits as a surprise. The renewal is here, and now I can sleep again.

I stepped into one final jumper and I went back inside, where there are no seasons.