The VAs’ postseason came to a screeching halt, and they return home empty-handed. Their disappointment is clear as day when they board the bus in Monroe back to Jennings.
“That was eight of the most exciting days in my life as a Venomous Agenda; for once that we could accomplish something in the sports arena!” Taylor sighs.
“There’s always next year, I guess…” Heather comments on this elimination.
“Easy for you to say, when you’re not a senior; my life as a basketball player is over!” Charlotte starts crying. “I spent my whole life up to this point preparing for this moment!”
In years past, some players were unhappy at VA and it led to them transferring out, football, basketball incurring the biggest losses. We lost players over the years to schools like, you know, Church Point, Kinder, due to inadequate funding, or perhaps the academic pressures in some cases, the comments of the players get to the coach. So while players crying at the end of the season is normal, this is more emotional to this year’s outgoing seniors.
On Friday morning, Pablo meets with Audrey again, whose mood is visibly down. He feels like he must discuss his future with her.
“Oh Audrey, this game got to you… why?” Pablo asks, while he’s made to feel like this loss to Wossman was a major deal to her.
“If only you saw what happened last night!” Audrey starts crying.
“I couldn’t make the trip, I could only listen to the game on radio! You’re making it sound like that three-pointer is even worse than freaking Huiling at Pearl River!”
“Yeah, we might have played the three most exciting basketball games in our lives, and for some of us, we might never again live that kind of excitement!”
“The seniors on the girls’ basketball team? I never talked to Charlotte and Taylor much, however, Carrie and Heather have one season left to play!”
And this makes me want to give her a book about coming to terms with the end of one’s sporting career. I didn’t get to read The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants much, so I might want to wait until I finish it to give her a book, Pablo starts to think of what to give her next, and when.
“And we might find ourselves in a similar situation two years from now in our respective sports! We kept our academics up, and hopefully we’ll attend LSU or some higher-tier college!” Audrey talks about the academics.
“You still have quiz bowl-State to look forward to, and we’ll attend the HSNCT together! Just not on the same squad, though”
“We can count ourselves lucky, that we still have our chance to get under the spotlight again a few months from now! And that we can even get under the local spotlight for quiz bowl to begin with!”
“I don’t think the time is ripe to talk about this topic any further here in the hallway”
“Yet everyone here knows about this stupid three-pointer of a buzzer-beater by now!” Carrie scolds her teammate.
Wossman isn’t a quiz bowl-playing school, and neither is Pearl River. So there’s no chance we’ll play them at quiz bowl-State, much less at the HSNCT, Audrey ruminates, while she can’t help but imagine how Charlotte and Taylor must feel when their entire athletic lives crashed down when the Wossman Wildcats scored that three-pointer buzzer beater in Monroe.
These two girls are easy to spot across the hallway because they are the ones crying their tears away.
“We didn’t lose just about any game! This tournament was supposed to be our swan songs as basketball players!” Charlotte cries on the floor. “And then we lost in the quarterfinals to a team that somehow scored a buzzer-beating three-pointer!”
“I wasn’t going to play basketball in college, so I wanted my days in high school to finish with a bang!” Taylor then starts crying. “Instead of that, it finished in a whimper, and I will never look at basketball the same way again!”
“I don’t think anyone on this team will play basketball in college, unless Audrey was somehow good enough for, say, Caltech?” Heather comments, the latter part as a joke estimate of who could possibly play in college on this VA squad.
And even that is not a given. The bottleneck will be the basketball talent pool Caltech will deal with. There’s no telling whether Caltech will even have a better power forward attending, but it’s more likely that she will hit 34+ on the ACT than her being invited to play for Caltech! Heather starts wondering for whom Audrey could possibly play in college, knowing that Audrey is by far the strongest academically of the starters and hence has more options than everyone else. The Ivy League? Maybe if she somehow becomes good enough next season to make the first all-state team in our division! Because all-state teams are named on a per-division basis. However, there’s a caveat: the Ivy League is likely going to be her basketball ceiling. Heather then turns to Pablo:
“Why single out Audrey?” Pablo asks after overhearing Audrey’s teammates talking about how important the state tournament was to them. “All I knew about the other players outside the court was that Carrie is weaker academically than Audrey is!”
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“Exactly: she’s the strongest academically on the team!” Heather answers him, before Pablo turns to Charlotte and Taylor.
“Knowing that we didn’t enter the state tournament in the past three years, what difference would going into the semifinals have made to you two?” Pablo asks the two seniors.
“Pablo, ask yourself what difference it would make what round of the state tournament the football team would reach if you needed to wait until senior year to compete in the first place!” Taylor rebounds the question to him.
“I wouldn’t be the best player to answer the question, since I play quiz bowl as well, and I am playing at the HSNCT this year. I’m just not playing at quiz bowl-State, though. Please ask Finn or any other football player dating girls on the team!”
“The loss in the quarterfinals, against a team which, since the pandemic, was always in the conversation for the state championship, stings because you believed that, were it not of this three-pointer, we could have won not only the game, but winning the semis and, possibly the final, would have been feasible!”
“You leave me no choice!” Audrey tells them. “Even if we won last night, there would have been no guarantee that we could have won against, like, Albany! None of the other semi-finalists would have played the same as Wossman did!”
“However, because Wossman had at least as much talent as Albany and whoever else we could have played in the final, winning the state championship would have been at least feasible because we know we would have enough talent and coordination to make it happen!” Charlotte retorts.
“One last question: did you decide where to go after graduation, college, trade school, work, anything?” Taylor’s boyfriend asks her from behind.
“No!” Both Charlotte and Taylor answer in unison.
Even if it meant playing two more games as tight as the Wossman one… I think my teammates will be plagued by “what could have been” parasitic thoughts for a while, at least until they decide on a course of action about life after high school, Audrey thinks of what’s going to happen to her now ex-basketball teammates, before walking away from them. I should probably cherish these memories of this state tournament myself, even though I know they differ from our last HSNCT run.
“From now until the HSNCT, we will be together at every quiz bowl practice. What about you come at my place after practice?” Audrey asks Pablo, right as the ring bells to get to their class.
“Yes…”
Hopefully, at quiz bowl practice, I will stop hearing about this basketball loss… Pablo sighs, even though his closeness to Audrey makes him get in contact with the other basketball players.
Once the quiz bowl practice begins, after school, it becomes clear in the early stages of the practice that Audrey is underperforming as she doesn’t buzz in as often, nor as well.
“Audrey, you missed the last two practices because of quiz bowl practices interfering with basketball. It seems like you’re not performing like your usual self today” Warren expresses his concerns over Audrey.
“It’s just the accumulation of basketball-induced fatigue, really. If this means I should go practice with the B-team today…” Audrey sighs.
“And then Pablo will practice with the A-team for today” Warren announces as Audrey trades seats with Pablo.
As Pablo sits next to Scott, Scott’s body is shaking, anxious to see if Pablo’s self for the day is any better than how Audrey was playing. May her body get some much-needed rest; I know how it is, drilling twice a day, every day, when the state tournament was underway. Not much different from football drilling!
Yet Pablo has hardly any in-game chemistry with the A-team, which makes him struggle to find his footing even in drills. In particular, the A-team players are thrown off.
“I really hope that Audrey is more rested on Monday then... She played such intense basketball that I can take her word for it!” Myriam formulates her wish, while she checks on the wagers she made in her mother’s name.
“It’s not that you play poorly, it’s that you just don’t know the same things as Audrey. As much leeway as being a special topics player could give both of you, at this level of quiz bowl, making sure players’ knowledge bases complement each other is critical!” Scott comments on his experience with Pablo.
“I get it, you were used to Audrey giving you a right of first refusal over certain topics and that I buzzed in... And it might be a little late to get you used to playing with me!” Pablo makes comments of his own.
Audrey then takes him to her home. She feels like her worn-out body might need some rest. And so she lies on the couch.
“This season, the team improved a lot. And certainly you. I believe that, if you improve some, you might be able to play basketball in the Ivy League...” Pablo comments on the games he attended in person.
“Thank you. I might have what it takes academically to attend an Ivy, but surely you know that there’s a difference between attending an Ivy and playing basketball for one! Right now, I feel more like I am headed for WUSTL or UChicago on a basketball level than playing for the Crimson! And that’s if I am going to play in college at all!” Audrey seems to feel a little uneasy about her future.
“I am sure WUSTL and UChicago are good academic fits for you. However, you’re implying these two universities are on a much lower playing standard than the Ivies!”
“I’m not simply implying that, Pablo, they are Division III universities to the Ivy League being a Division I conference! Heather estimated that I would need to make the all-state team next season for me to play for an Ivy, but otherwise no one else on the current squad could be playing in college, unless, by some miracle, a community college wanted Carrie or Heather!”
“Heather is making me feel like CCs take the scraps four-year colleges don’t want!”
Is Heather delusional? Or she knows something about college basketball recruiting that I don’t? However, Audrey has the luxury of approaching college recruiting without having to worry about academics. Which Carrie and Heather don’t have. They can always try, but I think Heather has an academic advantage over Carrie, Pablo thinks about her teammates’ collegiate prospects.
“Enough about basketball!” Audrey feels a little uneasy.
“All right, all right!” Pablo would rather comb YouTube in search of videos not related to basketball or quiz bowl, to get both to relax.
Music of various genres, comedy videos, end up being the primary videos the couple watches together. They need to pick their videos carefully, so they don’t double down on their mental exhaustion.
So when dinnertime comes, Pablo brews Audrey’s coffee (or painkiller) while Audrey cooks a chickpea salad with diced bacon, radish and onions. Or what would pass for Latvian pelekie zirni given what’s available to them: chickpeas were the closest thing to Latvian grey peas to them.
“There, some strong painkiller!” Pablo hands over the cup of coffee to Audrey, filled with a few spoons of vanilla cream.
“Good: I didn’t have your brew of painkillers for weeks!” Audrey then starts drinking coffee.
“Chickpea salad? Audrey, this gets me… is this your idea of healthier food?” Audrey’s father asks her, while he starts eating the chickpea salad.
“No added salt; the diced bacon was already salty enough as it is…” Audrey explains herself.