I can play basketball. I want to be accurate, because people get this wrong and then feel sorry for me in the wrong direction. I can shoot around. I can play a casual game with people who aren’t trying.

What I can’t do is compete — no contact, no full-court, nothing where I might take an elbow or hit the floor, and that’s permanent, and it was decided by a neurosurgeon in a room with a light box in April of 2022.

I was going to play in college. I’d been talked to by three programs. Not big ones. It was never going to be the WNBA and I knew that at fifteen, I’m not describing a stolen career.

I’m describing the thing I did every single day from when I was eight until I was seventeen.

There’s a court behind the elementary school on Fifty-Second. I drove past it about once a week for a year and a half and did not stop.

The thing nobody tells you about being called a hero at seventeen is that it fixes you in place.