“It never really came up that much,” she said. “It’s not like I spent a lot of time talking to your dad about his dad’s basketball career. The few times the subject came up, Gramps would just say that it was a school that went out of business a long time ago.”

“Did he finish college somewhere else?”

“I honestly don’t know,” Julia said.

“Dad must have known,” Lucas said.

“It was just never a big topic of conversation with us,” she said. “Your grandfather never really changes in this particular area. He only wants to focus on your career now. Back in the day, he only wanted to focus on your dad’s, at least until your dad got hurt.”

“Aren’t you a little bit curious?” Lucas said.

His mom grinned. “Not as curious as you obviously are,” she said.

Most of the time after dinner when he wasn’t doing homework or working on his basketball journal, he either wanted to watch a game, or read a book.

“I can’t believe you read when you don’t have to,” Ryan had said to him one time.

“It’s fun,” Lucas said.

“Dude,” Ryan said, “you have some weird ideas about having fun.”

Tonight, though, he was online, trying to get into what his mom called the way-back machine, and see if he could get any information about Sam Winston’s basketball career. He didn’t think of it as going behind Gramps’s back. But his mom was right. He was curious.

So he typed in “Sam Winston” and “basketball.”

There had been plenty of basketball players with the name “Winston,” first or last, but no player with that full name. There were a couple baseball players, and a football player.

Nothing for a basketball player with Gramps’s name.

So Lucas took a deeper dive. He typed in the name and typed in “basketball” and then “California” and “1960s,” which is when Gramps would have played college ball.

Still nothing.

It occurred to him that Gramps had played so little, wherever he had played, that there wasn’t a record of him having played at all in the way-back machine, especially at a school he said had gone out of business. Lucas was starting to think that maybe he wasn’t working on a biography at all, but a mystery.

But Lucas wasn’t giving up, not yet. He pictured himself in the gym or at Westley Park, and all the hours he’d spent putting in extra hours on his shot.

For now, he took one last try.

He typed in “California colleges that closed.”

Except that just made him even more confused, because of the long list that came up, not just including colleges that had closed in the past, but some that had merged with other colleges over time, becoming brand-new schools with new names.