He walked to the back of the room and hugged Gramps, who hugged him back. No one said anything in the library until Mr. Dichard did.

“I guess Lucas is right,” he said. “One vote tonight is enough.”

The Claremont Wolves cheered.

THIRTY-SIX

Gramps drove Lucas and Ryan to the big game on Saturday morning.

They were the first ones to the gym. It gave them a chance to work more on the help defense they’d practiced on Thursday night, as a way of getting ready to play the Jefferson Jazz, and particularly Corey Tanner.

“We’re not gonna use this scheme of mine the whole game,” Gramps said. “Who knows, maybe we won’t need to use it at all if things go our way. But even if we just get one chance to use it, we better use it right, because the championship might ride on it.”

Maybe because it was just the three of them for now, Gramps’s voice sounded really loud in the gym, as if he were shouting, even though he never did that.

“By now,” Gramps said to Lucas and Ryan, “I guess we’ve figured out that we can all use a little help sometimes.”

They had rolled out bleachers on both sides of the gym for the championship game, as a way of accommodating the biggest crowd, by far, Lucas and the guys had seen all season.

The championship trophy was somewhere in the building. They didn’t know where. But it was here, and so were they.

“Still a long way to go between us and that trophy,” Lucas said to Ryan when they were in the layup line.

“Dude,” Ryan said. “I’m just glad we’re all here. Because it wasn’t all that long ago that I wasn’t sure I’d be.”

“Or Gramps,” Lucas said.

“You still keeping that basketball journal?” Ryan said.

Lucas told him it had turned into more of a project than their English papers, because of everything that kept happening.

“Let’s go write a good ending,” Ryan said.

“How about a great one?” Lucas said.

Not for the first time, he was glad Mr. Collins had suggested he keep a diary. Mr. C. had been right. Someday when he read it, he still might not believe everything that had happened, even though he’d lived it all.

When Gramps gathered them around him right before the start of the game, he kept his remarks brief. As usual.

“Everything under the sun that needs to be said has been said,” Gramps told them. “I’ll just build on something my grandson said the other night. You all know who you are. Now all that’s left to do is show everybody one more time.”