‘Higher and higher peaks’

On Tuesday Claire Asbury and a friend watched the DVD of the Kansas game for the first time. On Wednesday I was lucky enough to have her thoughts show up in my inbox. Here, with her permission, is a piece:

When we watched the other games (yeah, we did a marathon -- mainly the 2nd halves of the other 3 and then the whole Kansas), esp. G and G, we kept saying “HOW did we win this game? HOW did we pull it out?” We saw the plays and we saw the clock count down and we even saw the mistakes but I think we still kind of have this haze of miracle, and how does that shot fit together with the next possession, and how did we make it from possession to possession, time out to time out, and make it turn out the way it did? That’s what hits me always when I’m starting the 2nd half of Gtown -- we were down by 11 and at the end of those 20 minutes, we’d won by 4. And those boys walking onto the court didn’t plan it that way. They played to win, yes, but they had to do it all within that span of time -- and they didn’t know it yet. And it’s so different when you know you’re going to lose -- we moaned and groaned so much more over the mistakes, “if we had just done THAT differently ...” It was harder to completely appreciate the great plays and shots we DID make because we knew the end (although Bryant’s 3s sent chills up my spine because I remember how pumped up we were, and you can hear us screaming). BUT -- it also reminded me of the several times that I dipped into despair during the game, when we were down six, or when they kept hitting (although they missed a good amount too, it seemed), and I just came to this resigned acceptance (“I was happy just beating the Zags, I CANNOT complain about losing to Kansas”) that we would probably have to deal with being 10 down by the end and we would know it was over before it was over -- I expected that, to a point. Or I prepared myself for it at least. But the boys kept un-preparing me, cutting me loose from that, making us hit higher and higher peaks of ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE.