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first commercial, he snuck into the kitchen and grabbed a bag of Doritos and a small bottle of Gatorade, even though it was way past what his mom called “the junk-food deadline.” Then he came back and watched Lenny’s man, LeBron, do things with the basketball the announcers said only Michael Jordan had ever done at the same age.
    That always annoyed Billy’s dad, every time they did that during a Cavs game, because he’d point out that kids like Billy had never even seen Michael Jordan play.
    This had always been the time of night, the last hour before bed, when Billy and his dad would sit on the couch together in this room and watch games together. His dad would do a better job announcing the game than the real announcers did.
    But not tonight.
    His dad wasn’t there.
     
Billy had started playing in the Rec League when he was seven. So this was his fourth year playing for his dad, who was the only coach he’d ever had.
    Lenny’s dad was the assistant coach this year, but he’d only signed on so that Billy and Lenny could play on the same team. Under the rules of the Y, you could play on the team that your dad coached, and each team could have two coaches.
    Some dads only coached together so they could put two star players together—it didn’t matter to them whether the kids were friends or not. But Joe Raynor and Pete DiNardo had known each other since they were kids, and Billy and Lenny were best buds, so the whole thing worked out great for everybody, especially Mr. DiNardo, who only had to come to the games and watch from the bench.
    The Magic was Joe Raynor’s team, the best one he’d had since he’d started coaching Billy, the best one by far. And he’d made it clear since their very first practice, from the first Wednesday night in the gym at West School, that they were all supposed to have one goal: Win the league championship.
    It was something he and Billy had never done together.
    They had lost twice in the semifinals, twice in the finals. Last year they were down one point with five seconds left when Billy had gotten fouled and sent to the free throw line to shoot two free throws.
    If Billy had made both, his team—known as the Blue Devils last year—would have been ahead by a point and probably would have won the game and the championship of the eight- and nine-year-old division.
    He missed them both.
    The first one he shot way too hard, even as he heard his dad yelling at him to relax from the bench. It bounced off the backboard and didn’t even hit the rim.
    He still had one to tie.
    Billy bounced the ball five times like he always did, because his dad had taught him to always follow a routine when you shot free throws. He took a deep breath and shot the second one much better, got that good feeling you get when you think you’ve put just the right spin on the ball.
    But it was a little too long. The ball caught the back of the rim and then hit the front of the rim and hung there, like it couldn’t decide whether it wanted the game to be tied or not, like it was deciding whether the Blue Devils or the Huskies should win the championship.
    It decided on the Huskies.
    Billy stared at the rim afterward and felt worse than he ever had about sports, felt the kind of sad that you felt on the last day of summer vacation.
    Billy had never forgotten that day, not just because he missed both free throws, but because of the way his dad took the loss, even though he told Billy and everybody else on the Blue Devils how proud he was of them afterward.
    He’d told Billy the same thing all the way home, how proud he was of him, how the Blue Devils wouldn’t even have been in a position to win the game if Billy hadn’t shot the lights out of the basket all day.
    But when they did get home, his father had gone into his study, what he called his trophy room—“We’re going to add one more to the collection today,” he’d said before they left to play the Huskies—and closed the door. He spent the