Four seconds. Columbia's guard was coming at me. Brent was rolling toward the basket on the left side with his hand up, wide open, the six-eight center stuck behind him, and it was his shot; anybody in the gym would have told you it was his shot. Everybody in that gym had come to watch Lansing Hill's Callahan. I faked the pass to him. I faked it so well I think the Columbia guard is still waiting for it. And Brent, under the basket, with his goggles fogged and his hand up, did a thing that I didn't expect and that Gil Callahan told me years later was the moment he understood his son was going to be all right. Brent pointed at me. Not at the basket. At me. Shoot it, he was saying. It's yours.
So I shot it the way I'd shot it four thousand times under a yellow bulb in an alley with a freight train going by. Soft. High. Dead center. The only shot a sawed-off milk crate would let through.
It didn't touch the rim. I know that because I didn't hear anything at all.
What I heard instead, a half-second later, was my mother. I would know that sound anywhere; I'd heard it once before, the night I was nine and won the spelling bee at Knickerbocker Elementary on the word "chrysanthemum." It isn't a scream. It's a sort of high astonished whoop, like a teakettle discovering it can sing. Over eleven hundred people and the horn and the Columbia bench sagging and our whole team piling on top of me at the free throw line, with Leon's knee in my ribs and Kevin Shea yelling "Laundry! Laundry!" into my ear like it was the best name anybody had ever been given, I heard my mother whoop from the fourth row. When I finally got out from under everybody, she was standing on the bleacher seat in her Hollister work cardigan with Dolores holding on to the back of it so she wouldn't fall, and she had both hands over her mouth, and she was crying. She had never seen me play. Not once. Not in the alley, not in the gym, not anywhere. She'd only ever heard the ball through the bathroom window.
Brent found me in the pile. He had his goggles pushed up on his forehead and he grabbed me by both shoulders, the way he'd grabbed me at the tryout, the same two hands, and for a second my body flinched before my brain caught up. He felt it. I saw him feel it. He loosened his grip and just held on, lightly, and said, close to my ear, "Thanks for getting it back."