I make the second shot, too.

There’s still a minute left, and now we’re up by one. Murchison comes down court and passes the ball inside to big number 7. He turns around and dunks, pulling himself up on the rim, so that it snaps back into place when he lets go. Murchison fans are going crazy; they’re up by one, and keep shouting the same thing over and over again: “Keith, Keith, Keith.” When he runs, there’s something funny about his arms: it’s like he has to pull himself along. You want to get out of his way.

Pete dribbles across half court and takes a jump shot from the top of the key—nothing but net. Hornets by 1. Murchison throws the ball inbounds, but Daniel Krasnick has been hanging back. He manages to stick out a hand and knock it toward half court, where he chases it down. But Murchison traps him against the sideline. I can hear Mr. Tomski calling out behind me, “Time-out, time-out!” Nobody listens. Pete cuts to the basket, and Daniel tries to find him with a pass. But there’s no way through, Murchison steals it, and suddenly we’re all running the other way. One of their guys has been cherry-picking at the other end, and Keith throws a long pass over our heads. The kid lays it in and Murchison is up by one.

“Time-out!” Mr. Tomski calls again, and the ref finally hears him. He blows his whistle and we all jog over toward the bench.

What happens next happens in a kind of silence. Mr. Tomski is talking but I can’t really hear him—he’s got his clipboard in hand and is drawing up a play. Everybody else is talking, too, five hundred people in the gym all talking at once, but the noise is like traffic when you’re on the highway, it’s everywhere and all the time and there’s nothing you can do about it, so somehow you close your ears and shut it off, but that means shutting everything else out as well, including Mr. Tomski. There’s a whistle and I feel someone hitting my back and then I’m jogging out onto the court again in the middle of all the lights with nine other boys.

There are only seventeen seconds left in the game, but seventeen seconds can take a long time if you count them out slowly. The way Mr. Tomski counted out the seconds on the football field, using his fingers: one, two, three, four, five; one, two, three, four, five, and so on. Pete has the ball and dribbles up court. He’s letting the clock run down—he wants to take the last shot. Mr. Tomski calls out, “Fifty-one! Fifty-one!” and Pete puts his fist in the air. I run down to the block to set a pick for Daniel, who sprints hard to the free throw line, but I can’t remember what to do after that. Suddenly I notice that Mabley is sitting right there, a few rows up behind the basket, screaming silently it seems with her face a mess of orange and black. My hands feel as cold as ice.