On the temporality of human ability.

I remember my last basketball game in high school. We were in the lowest class of a sports conference that meant little to nothing in terms of real athletic competition but those days playing ball in high school meant everything to me.

The very last game of competitive basketball I played was right after I'd been in the hospital for two weeks. I was weak and probably shouldn't have played but that didn't matter at the time. You could have told me I was going to die 5 minutes after the game and I would have played still knowing it was the last thing I'd do on earth. Evan, Kenny, Sam and Jacob probably remember every moment of that game more than I do. One of two things I remember from that game is a shot I missed. Sam gave me a perfect behind-the-back pass for an easy bucket and I just flat out missed because I was too weak from being sick and underestimated it. I'll never forget that miss for the rest of my life.

The only other part of that game I'll ever remember is right after in the locker room. I cried because I knew I'd lost something. When we lost that game we lost the opportunity to play basketball in an arena that mattered. No more win-loss record, no more practice, no more fans. It was all over.

I was taken back to that moment in my life tonight. The Aggies lost their NCAA tournament game against Purdue today and some of us went to meet them at the arena as they arrived back in College Station. While we were waiting at the arena for them to arrive I thought of all the encouraging things I would say to them "You carried us all season, thank you", "There's only so much you can do before it's out of your hands", "you did everything you could". When they got there all I could think of was that moment in high school when it was all over. There were no words that could salvage that moment. Nothing changed what happened and what they lost when that game ended. I looked Bryan Davis and Donald Sloan in the eye and I shook their hands but I didn't try any of the encouraging phrases I'd come up with while we waited. They experienced today a thousand times the amount of pain I have in knowing their dream has died. They competed with the best on the biggest stage and fell short of their dreams. Nothing will change that.

That leads me to the point of this post. Everything in this world is limited based on time. Natural aging and other, more arbitrary, rules regarding time control how long we are able to pursue what we want and what we're good at. Tonight made me realize, in the same way as that last high school basketball game did, that nothing lasts forever. We need to do everything we can to the best of our ability while we can. That chance doesn't last forever.