The car didn’t pull away until Lucas was inside the front door and waving out at his grandfather. Lucas’s mom was at the kitchen table, grading papers. She taught English at the small college in town, St. Luke’s.

She looked at Lucas over her reading glasses and smiled.

“I was thinking after you left tonight,” Julia Winston said, “that if I added up your official practices with the Wolves and your unofficial practices with your grandfather, basketball is as much of a job for you as seventh grade is.”

“But I don’t think of it as a job, Mom,” Lucas said. “A job is cleaning my room.”

“I’m glad you brought that up,” she said, still smiling at him.

“I should have known I was walking into a trap,” he said. “But I promise I’ll do it at halftime of the game.”

“There’s always a game,” she said.

“It’s the Celtics,” he said.

If LeBron was Lucas’s favorite player, the Celtics were his favorite team, because they had been his dad’s team. Same with his mom. And they shared the same favorite Celtic, Jayson Tatum, the small foward from Duke whom Lucas was sure was going to be one of the best players in the league someday, probably soon.

“I’ve got a better idea,” she said. “Why don’t you run upstairs and clean your room now, and then maybe we’ll have a conversation about you maybe being able to watch till the end of the game tonight.”

“Who’s the best mom in the world?” he said.

“The one who will only consider letting you stay up late if your room passes inspection,” she said. “Which would be the same mom who plans on watching some of the game with you as soon as I finish reading these papers.”

It wasn’t that she didn’t like basketball. She did. She had told Lucas plenty of times about how much she’d loved watching his dad play when he was the star at Claremont High School, at least before he tore up his knee his senior year, doing enough damage to it that he lost out on any chance at a college scholarship. Gramps had talked more about the player Michael Winston had been, the kind of star high school point guard he wanted Lucas to grow up to be.

But instead of playing in college, he’d become a pre-med student. After college he went to med school, and a few years after graduating from med school he became the youngest team doctor in the history of the Boston Celtics, an orthopedic surgeon specializing in the kind of ACL tear that had ended his career.