I'm about to give up on following basketball. After watching about fifteen games of the NCAA tournament, I've seen too many prematurely-hoisted 3-point shots and recklesss body launches into opposing defenses for me to draw any other onclusion than that team ball has died and it's all a televised circus show. What Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan spawned has finally come back to kill the game.

Where those players--and those of their time---delighted crowds with no-look passes and mercurial shots, they did so in the knowledge that they would include teammates when it counted--witness MJ's double-nickle game against the Knicks, which he ended with a dime to--Bill Wennington.

Two dribbles and a jump shot. UConn is up by three over Butler with 15 minutes left, and they worked 5 seconds off the clock before settling for--you got it!--a jump shot!

Man, oh man!

James Joyce--The Dead

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

There is little that is lovelier than this. I am at a loss to think of a greater ending to a story

A Girlfriend's Dog

At what point do you forget the name of an old girlfriend’s dog? Not the one that bit you on the arm (dog, not girlfriend), but just an ordinary dog that occasionally trotted past you in their living room or slept in front of you as you picked her locks on the sofa. I had a girlfriend years ago—when I was nineteen—whom I thought I loved deeply, and I thought of her day and night. We went out for a year before we broke up. For a while after we broke up, I thought of everything about her, including the warmth of her family home, and the faces and names of her family members, and among these I placed her dog, since they treated him like a family member (they even fed him turkey during the holidays).
A few months ago I thought of this girlfriend, and I recalled the holiday meals at her house, and the faces and name of her family. But I could not for the life of me recall the name of her dog. I can picture its size and coloring, and I think that its name began with the letter “C.” But at what moment did I lose the dog’s complete name? There must have been a moment when you might have asked me, “Just what was the name of that dog of an old girlfriend?” And to this I would have replied with full confidence, “Charlie.” But had you waited another moment to pose the same question, I might have answered with, ‘Corky’? or was it ‘Cortense’?” And if you had waited yet another measure of time to ask me, I might have responded with “Callie”, or “Canover.” But more time has passed since those hypothetical questions, and now my answer has been reduced to “C-------.”
Soon, no telling when, I will refer to the dog as “Bernie”, and then soon thereafter I will deny that my old girlfriend even had a dog, or even a name of her own, and then I will forget that I had a girlfriend.
And all those little moments that my old girlfriend and I shared together, like the time we escaped from the rain into an old baseball dugout in a field where I had played little league ball or the time when we got stranded in a snowstorm together on Christmas Eve and missed Christmas with our families---all of that will vanish.