Play of the Game

Today is April 16th. My mom, dad, aunt, and I are going to Maine for the weekend for basketball. I was not sure if we were going to go because I wasn’t feeling the best, but we decided to go anyway. We knew it was going to be around a two and a half hour drive. When we finally get there, it is around 9:00p.m. so it is dark outside. When we got into the hotel. we went to bed almost instantly because I had a game at 8:00 in the morning. 

When I woke up, I was really nervous because I had never played in Maine before. We started to drive to the facility for the first game. When we got there, I had a really bad case of first game jitters. When the game is about to start both of the teams are doing warm ups, I felt like I was going to have a decent game.

 The game starts and I do the jump ball. I win the jump ball and we start to bring up the ball and we see that they are playing man to man defense. We then run our play, “32,” and Dempsey scores. We then go on to win that game by 15 points. I had 13 points in the game. We then have around an hour before our next game. That time seems to fly by and our next game is starting. We then go on to win that game and I finish with around 15 points and 2 blocks.The finals are upon us.  We are all really feeling the pressure because we beat everyone by around 15 points and so did team that we are playing. We need to win this game to finish the day off undefeated. I would love to win this game and my whole team wanted the same thing. My team and I start to warm up before the game and we see this guy on the other team that we would say was in 9th grade. That’s how tall he is. I was really scared, but I knew we had to work hard. Both of the teams, mine and the other team we were playing, were feeling really sore from the last game but we still want to win. The game starts. The ref throws the ball up and we win the jump. We then go to our most used play. But it doesn’t work and we make a turnover and the other team scores.  Right there we knew this would be the hardest game of the day. The next possession we come to our senses and we get the ball into the paint. That is where we score most of our points and the guy we thought was in 9th grade jumps up and swats the ball out of the air. We were all in “ah”. That’s when we started to fall apart, even though we were only five minutes into the first half. We were all really scared now. Our coach, Patrick Perry, called a timeout and brought us over to the bench. The team sits there for a couple seconds in complete silence. Than all he said was, “Do you guys wanna win?! Because if you don’t we can all go home right now.” We all just sat there in silence. He said “Do you?” The whole team said yes in a very small voice. Then he sent us back onto the floor. Then the team and I started to get the drive to win the game. 

We went on to have a big scoring streak. We are now in the lead. The team hasn’t let them score for three minutes. There is one minute left. They then go on to score four points. My team is now exhausted. We go down the floor and they steal the ball. They are running in transition with their best player having the ball. I’m sprinting back and trying to get back on defense the best player on the other team goes up for the layup. I jump up to try to catch up. Somehow I got up so high I blocked him. The crowd went crazy. My team gets the rebound and our headed back down the court for an easy layup. We are in the lead by one basket with 10 seconds. They head down the court and try to shoot a three, but they miss, “thank god”. The buzzer went off and my whole team was in disbelief and so happy. After the game, the people who run the tournament asked our coach who the MVP of the game was. That is when he called me over. I asked why he called me over. He said, “You are the play of the game because you never gave up.”