So maybe she wouldn’t tell anyone about this, either. And maybe the “I” could become a “we” again, so I wouldn’t feel so entirely alone in this.

I pulled up a slew of blue stop sign images for her. “Funny, but I always thought that stop signs were red,” I said in an offhand kind of way.

She looked at me for a moment—not stumped or confused, but pensive. Then she nudged me aside and got on the computer, doing a search of her own. In a few seconds a picture of a dress popped up.

“A while back there was a big controversy over the colors of this dress. What do they look like to you?”

It was pretty obvious. I wondered if it was some kind of trick.

“It’s white with gold stripes,” I told her. “Duh.”

She shook her head. “That’s not what I see. When I look at that same picture, I see a blue dress with black stripes.”

I looked at it again. “That’s crazy. You’re kidding me, right?”

“Nope. And it’s not just me. Thirty percent of people see the dress like I do, and seventy percent see it the way you do. The point is, different people see the world in different ways . . . so who’s to say if your red is everyone else’s blue?”

It was the most comforting explanation yet. I wanted to thank her for it, but felt it would get awkward really quickly if I expressed the level of emotion I was actually feeling, so I just said, “That makes sense.”

She smiled and left, satisfied to have solved my little dilemma. I watched as she walked away, then looked around to see if anyone else was watching me watch. Then I took a deep breath, let it out, and made the conscious decision to let the whole thing go. I had better things to do than get stuck in a mental riddle that I knew I’d never be able to solve. Katie’s explanation made sense. Or at least sense enough to cling to.

But before I left the library, I stopped a passing student. “Hey,” I said. “What color is your shirt?”

He looked at it. “It’s red.”

Which is exactly how I saw it, too.

Practice that day was hard. It always was—but even as hard as our practices were, games have a certain energy level that practices don’t reach. See, practice is just that. It’s a projection into the future. It’s about being strong enough and skilled enough to compete. But in a game, you’re living in the moment; everything is sharper and every second comes at you harder. In other words, while I might hit hard in practice, the hits on game day have a completely different feel. A world-changing feel.