The Best Wild Cat There Ever Was…
The Best Wild Cat There Ever Was: A Study in Temporary Perfection
A lynx is agile—has keen senses, excellent vision. They meow and growl. This wild cat is the best there ever was.
[In the margin: Felis lynx: solitary by nature, except when raising young]
The goat. Aiming for a fifth title before facing another uncertain future. Someone's body crashes into the hardwood, the sound like a door slamming in an empty house. The team's time is right now—a sentence we say about death, about birth, about the moment before everything changes.
The coach has said that she doesn't want this to end. The dominance. But also, I think, the particular weight of these bodies moving through space together, the way sweat makes them shine under arena lights like something holy. They might have had the title last year if not for a handful of questionable calls—the referee's whistle still lives in their joints, a ghost pain that flares during practice.
[In the margin: Sara Ahmed: "To be affected by something is to evaluate that thing"]
They dominated not because of overwhelming talent or athletic ability but by playing the way a purist can love. Watch them: the crisp movement like a sentence perfectly punctuated, unselfishness as bodily practice—the assist more beautiful than the score. Cohesive defense: five bodies becoming one organism, breathing in sync. Mental toughness, which is another way of saying they swallow their pain like a pill without water.
They're getting the chance to win it all again. Together. Before reality scatters these players to the far corners of the league like seeds from a dandelion you thought you were just holding, not destroying.
[In the margin: Dispersal patterns in nature vs. expansion drafts]
"You never know what a team looks like from year to year." The coach's hands move when she says this, as if trying to hold water. Everything is up in the air—players, contracts, the ball spinning on someone's fingertip during warm-ups. We don't know what's going to be happening with the season next year. The future is unknown, which is true of all futures but feels specific to this one, the way pregnancy is always about this particular body, this particular becoming.
All that we know is that we have these games left with each other. The possessive pronoun doing so much work here—these games, not any games. Each other, not just others. And so we need to make the best of it, make sure that we are seeing each other as long as possible. Seeing, not just playing with. The difference between looking and witnessing.
[In the margin: Judith Butler on grievable lives—which losses count as losses]
They will lose players in the expansion draft. The language of loss already present, already grieving. They'll keep young players who could earn playing time—earn, as if minutes were currency, as if time could be deserved rather than simply passing.
That's something the whole team is thinking about. Even during free throws, even during the anthem, even when their bodies are supposedly at rest. Last year didn't end the way they wanted it to. Such a clean sentence for such a messy wound. To have a different outcome, you need to approach it differently. The coach becomes philosopher: same river, different water.
"We want to show off everything we have been working on the whole year." Show off—children's language in professional mouths, reminding us they were all once girls in driveways, shooting at hoops their fathers hung.
[In the margin: The etymology of "team": from Old English, meaning "offspring, family"]
"It's like we're all sisters." Like, not are. The simile preserving necessary distance even as it claims closeness. The closeness—we have talked about this for two years or more. Talking about closeness while being close, the meta-conversation that happens in locker rooms, on buses, in the trainer's room while someone's knee gets taped.
The way we go to work for each other. Work: labor, effort, showing up when the body says no. So often in pro sports, team unity is more of a concept than a reality. But watch them pick each other up from the floor—the hand extended before the fallen player even fully realizes they've fallen. This group plays together has imbued the phrase with meaning—meaning that lives in the muscles, in the automatic cut to the basket when someone else draws the defense.
[In the margin: Etymology of "devastate": from Latin, "to lay waste, as by a tornado"]
The team was devastated and embittered after their final playoff game last year. They couldn't motivate themselves with notions of revenge or by adopting the ever-cliched "us against the world" mentality that proves only that the team lacks imagination. Instead—and here's where the lynx returns, that solitary cat who hunts in silence—they have vowed to play for each other. To honor what they have built, which is the best team in the most talent-saturated pro sports league in the world.
Sometimes the coach makes them feel like they are not very good. This too is a kind of love, the way a parent might say "you can do better" while seeing exactly how good you already are. So now is a good time to tell them they've done great things. The way they stepped up for each other—the vertical metaphor, as if caring were a staircase, as if love were elevation.
[In the margin: "Special": from Latin, "belonging to a particular species"]
It's a special group. They really enjoy being around each other. Enjoy: such a mild word for what happens when one player laughs and the whole bench erupts, contagious as yawning. They have that special playing for and with each other mindset. For and with—prepositions doing the work of philosophy.
"It's not lost on us how special this is." The double negative preserving what could be lost, acknowledging the finding. No one cares what happens from here. A lie, but a generous one. You can't take away from how special this group is. Can't take away—the defensiveness of the deeply attached.
Most everyone is hopeful for them, that they get to experience more highs in the coming weeks. Highs: victories but also the actual elevation, the jump, the moment suspended in air before gravity remembers its job.
[In the margin: Highway construction as metaphor for inevitable progress that destroys what was]
The road to a championship resembles an interstate highway construction zone. Lanes closed, merge ahead, expect delays. What happened last year doesn't matter and shouldn't occupy the team's thoughts. But bodies remember what minds try to forget—the same ankle turns, the same defensive rotation, muscle memory like grief, returning uninvited.
It has to come down to that singular focus on the task at hand. But they all have seen motivation, and it will show up as they compete. Because they're going to be hungry. Hungry: the body's first language, before words, before names, before we knew we were separate from our mothers. The lynx, too, knows this hunger. Knows how to wait, muscles coiled, for the perfect moment to spring.
This wild cat is the best there ever was. Was—past tense already, even as they're still playing, even as the season continues. The grammar of endings written into the beginning, the way death lives in every birth, the way goodbye lives in every hello between players who know this particular configuration of bodies will never happen again.
