The only two I recognized for certain were Diane Logan and Nancy Cleghorn. Diane’s strong slender legs could still do for a Vogue cover. She’d been our star forward, co-captain, honors student. Caroline had told me Diane now ran a successful Loop PR agency, specializing in promoting black companies and personalities.

Nancy Cleghorn and I had stayed in touch through college; even so, her strong square face and frizzy blond hair were so unchanged, I would have known her anyplace. She was responsible for my being here tonight. She directed environmental affairs for SCRAP—the South Chicago Reawakening Project where Caroline Djiak was the deputy director. When the two of them realized the Lady Tigers were going into the regional championships for the first time in twenty years, they decided to get the old team together for a pregame ceremony. Publicity for the neighborhood, publicity for SCRAP, support for the team—good for everyone.

Nancy grinned when she saw me. “Yo, Warshawski—get your ass moving. We gotta be on the floor in ten minutes.”

“Hi, Nancy. I ought to have my head examined for letting you get me down here. Don’t you know you can’t go home again?”

I found four square inches of bench to dump my gym bag on and quickly stripped, stuffing my jeans into the bag and putting on my faded uniform. I adjusted the socks and tied the high-lacing shoes.

Diane put an arm around me. “You’re looking good, Whitey, like you still could move around if you had to.”

We looked into the mirror. While some of the current Tigers topped six feet, at five-eight I’d been the tallest one on our team. Diane’s afro was about level with my nose. Black and white, we’d both wanted to play basketball when race fights were a daily disruption in hall and locker room. We hadn’t liked each other, but junior year we’d forced a truce on the rest of the team and the next February we’d taken them to the first statewide girls tournament.

She grinned, sharing the memory. “All that garbage we used to put ourselves through seems mighty trivial now, Warshawski. Come over and meet the reporter. Say something nice about the old neighborhood.”

The Herald-Star’s Joan Lacey was the city’s only woman sports columnist. When I said I read her stuff regularly she smiled with pleasure. “Tell my editor. Better still, write a letter. So how do you feel putting on your uniform after all these years?”

“Like an idiot. I haven’t held a basketball since I left college.” I’d gone to the University of Chicago on an athletic scholarship. The U of C offered them long before the rest of the country knew that women played sports.

We talked for a few minutes, about the past, about aging athletes, about the fifty percent unemployed in the neighborhood, about the current team’s prospects.

“We’re rooting for them, of course,” I said. “I’m anxious to see them on the court. In here they look as though they take conditioning much more seriously than we did twenty years ago.”