We made sectionals as the six seed. The quarterfinal was against Columbia, from East Greenbush, at the Hudson Valley Community College gym on a Wednesday night in late February, and my mother traded shifts with a woman named Bernadette who wanted Easter weekend instead, which my mother said was robbery and worth it. She sat in the fourth row behind our bench with Dolores and Petey, who was keeping a carom chart on a legal pad and had, he told me afterward, invented a notation system for it that he was thinking of submitting to the Westinghouse Science Talent Search.
Gil and Joanne Callahan sat six rows up. He wasn't wearing the blazer. He didn't stand up once. Brent said later that it was the first game of his life when he'd never once heard his father's voice from the stands, and that at first he hadn't known what to do with the quiet, and then, by the second quarter, he'd started to hear the ball instead.
It was close the whole way. Columbia had a guard named Ritchie Lasko who could not miss from the left baseline, and a center who was six-eight and slow and mean. We were down one with forty seconds left. Leon had fouled out. Kevin Shea brought the ball up and ran the clock down and with nine seconds left he drove the lane and got bumped and put up a running hook that hit the front of the rim.
I heard it before it hit. Front iron, left of center, soft. It was coming off short and left, a flat dying bounce, right into the hole in Brent's world. Brent was on the left block with the six-eight center behind him. Columbia's center had position. He was going to get it.
I didn't go for the ball. I went for the place behind it. And as I went, I yelled, "Left, low, Brent, tip it, tip it right," and Brent, who couldn't see it, didn't try to see it. He trusted it. He put his left hand up blind into the empty corner of his own eye, into the place where for three years the world had simply stopped, and the ball arrived exactly where I'd said it would, and he tipped it, not at the basket, but right, across the lane, to the place where I was going to be.
It came into my hands the way it always did. Like a letter through a slot.