If you take a look at my Flickr, you might think that I bloody love bas­ket­ball. Go ahead, take a look. I have two gal­leries devoted to big bas­ket­ball games. The truth is, I don’t really care about bas­ket­ball. I mean, it’s enter­tain­ing, but I’m not a fan per se. I mean, I will prob­a­bly play AoM on a lap­top, on a los­ing team, on Juten­heim before I’d will­ing go to a bas­ket­ball game instead.

This vaca­tion, though, has been all about bas­ket­ball. We saw Brenna’s game first on Mon­day. It was a sev­enth grade game, as you can imag­ine. My aunt Sue was a ref. Brenna did a good job, but the game wasn’t very spec­tac­u­lar. Bryce and I vowed to drill Brenna on drib­bling for the rest of vaca­tion, but that won’t happen.

From there we went to Molly’s game, which was JV. We heard all kinds of sto­ries about an Amber Wollschlager, a 7’0″ tall high school var­sity player who trains dol­phins and can fly, from mom and dad. Appar­ently she trans­ferred to Mil­bank after sell­ing her soul for bas­ket­ball abil­i­ties. Then she round-house kicked the devil in the face and took her soul back, or so I heard.

Molly’s game was nice. The big thing I took away from the game was Molly’s new nick­name. Here was the sit­u­a­tion. The other team was bring­ing up the ball, near the out-of-bounds clos­est to us. Sud­denly, out of nowhere, Molly comes fly­ing at her from her left. Molly nails the girl, the ball goes fly­ing, and both of them end up out-of-bounds. Molly gets injured, the girl gets con­fused, and Molly gets a new nick­name: The Rhino. We would cheer on “The Rhino”, and we even came up with a hand gues­ture. I don’t remem­ber if they won or lost.

Then we saw the var­sity game. *holy crap* I thought that I’d be impressed with Amber, but I think the true star was 5′?” Cat­lyn Wojahn. This girl was unstop­pable. She was like a hum­ming­bird crossed with a viper. She got rebounds, scored points, stole the ball, and even more (more? yes, more!). We only stayed for the first quar­ter, though, then went home.

The next big game was Mil­bank vs. Ortonville. I got a bunch of pic­tures of that. We got there, and took our seat behind the Ortonville kids. I tell ya, high school girls seemed a lot older when I was in high school. I don’t think I knew more than 3 peo­ple from Mil­bank, and I knew about twice that from Ortonville. It was good, though. Mil­bank was the favorite, appar­ently. Not much excit­ing hap­pened the first half.

Then, at half­time, there was “A Buck A Ball”, and I gave Bryce a dol­lar to do it. He went out there, found a friend, and missed. Nice job. Then he went to the con­ces­sions, and after a lit­tle bit, I went, too. I got there, got Tony a soda (which was appar­ently the wrong kind), got myself a soda, and then I stood in line for the soft pret­zels. After much wait­ing, I got one. I’m about to go back into the audi­to­rium, when I see that they don’t allow food inside. So, I give Bryce the sodas, and I sit in the lobby, eat­ing a pret­zel, alone. I thought, “Hey, I can call Holli”, so then I wouldn’t look so lonely and pathetic, but my phone was dead. The only other inter­est­ing thing was the two tech­ni­cal fouls heaped on top of a nor­mal foul, which lead to three guys shoot­ing six free throws in a row. We have our the­o­ries as to what happened.

So as you can see, bas­ket­ball isn’t my top sport. I think that’s why I take pic­tures of the scores at the end, because I have no idea. I learn just enough to make up my own jar­gon, and heck­ling (“Your girl­friend doesn’t find you nearly as attrac­tive as you think she does!”), and cheer­ing terms. If you go to a game, and you hear a guy yelling, “That was unsat­is­fac­tory!”, it just might be me.