We used to think that all things become quaint. Hula hoops to Frisbees to My Mother the Car. Mutual Assured Destruction to Jonathan Livingston Seagull to frosted mugs of A&W root beer. American women who love Mad Men to American men who tuned into Australian Rules Football when ESPN was in its infancy.
But sweet little sixteen, in Chuck Berry’s phrase, resonates every year. The riches of this sporting season embarrass us. Northern Iowa dethroning Kansas. Purdue plodding along without its stalwart. ‘Cuse dominating without its big man. The scholarshipless Cornell winning two to meet mighty Kentucky.
And the greatest moment so far, a Spartan who ducked and gave his teammate the chance to catch and shoot at the buzzer.
He must have seen out of the corner of his eye young Lucious calling for the ball. Looking for an open man, the Michigan State fellow dribbling upcourt fired the rock that way, and the gentleman in the way, rather than reaching for what anyone would have taken for an errant pass, lowered his impressive frame to let the ball zip by into the hands of his intrepid teammate, who took a bounce of the ball and drilled it. String music.
“I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em,” as a Tammany Hall lieutenant said in the 19th century.
As the world turns (some say the earth has tilted a couple of inches off its axis because of the devastating earthquakes in Haiti), the better part of valor is to decline so that another may insure success for the clan.
Competition is a constant. We think it’s what Einstein was looking for to complete his unified field theory. We continue to miss the moment in space and time when a young man bows his head so that his brother might succeed.
Nothing quaint about that.
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