INDIANAPOLIS, April 5 -- One hour after the end of the Closing Ceremony of the 2010 Olympic Winter Games, I re-entered the United States via the Peace Bridge border crossing. I was shaking and crying. As I made my way down Interstate 5 in Washington State, I made an emotional pact with myself that I'd start living my life better. For two weeks, Canada had brought out the best of me, an innate compassion and empathy that America never seemed to allow. A few phone calls home had been clear warnings; I was heading back to a country where nearly everybody acts as a false center of the universe. I pledged to be different, turn the tide in some small way, and I would try my best to lead by example.
There were two days of return culture-clash, when our everyday decadence and indulgence appalled me to the point of sickness. But then, suddenly, I forgot about all those lofty and tearful promises. My heart hardened again, and I built my defenses back up. After three days back in the U.S.A., I was swearing too much, acting rude towards strangers, and being overly suspicious of people's motives. For two glorious weeks, though, I was able to play-act like a Canadian. Lying in wait, however, was the real me, barely beneath the surface. He was just itching to get back to its normal habitat.
My broken Olympic oath isn't some sort of unique experience, not by any means. I go through similar inter-reality friction whenever I return home from a trip to South America, and I'm pretty sure that any adventurer or vacationer knows what this is like, the hope against hope that just a little piece of the extraordinary will carry back over into everyday life. (Recall that moment in Lost in Translation when Bill Murray's character is in his hotel room, on the phone with his aloof wife, telling her he wants to eat healthier when he returns home. "Like Japanese food.") We try to hold on to the different as long as possible, but the same is simply too powerful.
The same is who you are and where you come from. The same will always find you, no matter how far you run, however long you think you can last. The patterns that define you are inescapable and will outlast the temporarily different. Even through resolutions and diets, third weddings and fifth religious choices, the same is still deep inside. All of the persistent reminders of one's slow construction are there, embedded in deep memory, and we'll never be able to completely scrub them out... no matter how hard we try. The designs of our lives are indelible.
Inertia is a difficult concept to convey in narrative form. Movies and novels are far more effective in telling tales of transformation and change, since the beginning and the end are always so close together. To truly capture inertia requires a grander long-form sweep, the type that's found in our new century's cinema-quality pay-television series. Over a span of many years, 13 episodes at a time, those with sufficient attention spans can follow characters like Tony Soprano and Don Draper and Bill Henrickson. Viewers can see exactly how stuck in their ways they are.
This is not a message that most people necessarily seek out willingly, this sad idea that our souls are trapped in cages. We're more likely to gravitate towards "inspirational" or "uplifting" messages, instead of mnemonic symbols of our tendency to repeat bad patterns. We get plenty of reminders of this dynamic in real life. Two years ago, we thought we were coming together to change America; we had hope that it would stick. But many of us have reverted to our apathy and inaction.
But we all hold hidden stores of hope for change, even if we don't really have the power to bring it about. Cynicism cannot exist in a vacuum; it is the anger of the broken heart, a defense against the emptiness left by death of hope. Cynics are the ex-dreamers who have realized that change is not under our control, and that the distance between hope and change is an unmeasurable void. Change is what happens to us.
Our Game has always unfolded slowly from season to season, five months at a time. The narrative path of each of the 6,739 Division I basketball players who appeared in games during 2009-10 is similar; each is an ongoing story of hope for change. The job of a coach is to transform young men from imperfect freshmen into well-rounded seniors, to build up their minds and bodies into instruments that can best assist the greater whole. (Hopefully, these lessons will serve them well later, when everybody isn't wearing numbered and colored shirts.) College basketball journalism represents a chronicle of this process; every feature article ever written has either been about hopes met or unmet, or small changes towards a greater one. There are absolutely no exceptions to this.
This sport that we love is also a curious study in stasis. When coaches stop coaching, and when players stop playing, the default is failure and irrelevance. Our Game penalizes those that come up short more than it rewards those who work hard. There is an invisible force pushing downward; teams, players and coaches spend every day fighting and struggling up against it, recruiting and planning and practicing to the best of their abilities and resources. But those that pause or falter are punished severely and viciously. This strange force, whatever it is, wants you to lose.
One hour after the end of the National Championship game of the 2010 NCAA Tournament, I left Indianapolis, the capital city of Hoops Nation. I drove north towards Chicago on Interstate 65, back towards a flight that would take me back to my offseason home in Rhode Island. As I passed through Lafayette, a message buzzed in on my phone. This is what it said:
I'm trying to come up with words to say how I feel. So proud of my Dawgs. Yet... I hear all the neutral fans say how disappointed they were that we couldn't pull it out at the end. I imagine how the world would be if that half-court shot (or the one before it) had gone in. It would have been.... perfect. It's not now. And I don't know if it will ever be that close again. It was almost Hoosiers. It almost didn't end in a loss. They almost won this one for all the small schools that never had a chance to get here. But they didn't. Please tell me they can try again next year?
It always ends in a loss. But this moment, right now, is a new beginning. It is the renewal of hope that things will finally change.
