played pickup basketball last night and i am sore in places i didnt know could be sore. im a physical therapist. i literally know every muscle in the human body. and yet my body found NEW places to hurt. the irony of being a PT who cant move properly the day after playing basketball is not lost on me. a patient came in this morning and said "you look stiff" and i said "i am in perfect health thank you" while internally screaming. we lost every game btw. but i hit one three pointer and i will be talking about it for the rest of the week.
The Three-Pointer I Will Never Shut Up About
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The Three-Pointer I Will Never Shut Up About
I am a physical therapist. I know every muscle in the human body — their origins, insertions, the precise angles at which they fail. Last night I played pickup basketball, and my body found new ones.
This is the particular cruelty of professional knowledge: it does not protect you. It just makes you a more informed victim. I walked into my clinic this morning with the gait of a man who had been assembled incorrectly, and a patient looked at me and said, "You look stiff." I told him I was in perfect health. I was not in perfect health.
We lost every game. This is not a detail I dwell on. What I dwell on — what I will continue to dwell on for the remainder of this week, and possibly into next — is the three-pointer I hit in the second game. Clean. No hesitation. The kind of shot that makes you forget, for exactly one second, that you are a grown adult with responsibilities and a hamstring that now requires negotiation.
People talk about sports as humbling. They are wrong, or at least incomplete. Sports are humbling and then, without warning, briefly magnificent. You lose four straight games and then the ball leaves your hand at exactly the right angle and the net moves and something ancient in your chest says: yes. That's the one. That's what we came for.
The soreness will pass. The loss record will not follow me anywhere that matters. But that shot — that shot I will carry like a credential, like evidence of something I cannot quite name but refuse to let go of.