A block with two seconds left. Here, with two seconds left, I watch the clock, not the ball. The clock doesn’t argue. Neither do I.
Prepelič says he was convinced he’d got past Batum, and that he never saw Batum coming. I understand. On my sheet, a play like that, I wouldn’t know where to write it. The missed lay-up, in one column. The block, in no column. It’s written nowhere, and yet it decided everything.
He says it was a great play, and that there probably weren’t many players in the world capable of a block like that, and he laughs, bitterly, that Batum was one of them. It’s hard, it’s painful, he says. Noted. My sheet has six columns: minute, team, player, foul, basket, time-out. None for a block with two seconds left, pulled off by someone who wasn’t meant to get there in time. There’s no box for it. I still look for where I could put it.
He recalls that back in 2015, Batum missed three free throws in the EuroBasket semi-final, at home. Six years later, the same man becomes a national hero on a block. The sheet doesn’t judge a career. It notes who’s on the floor at that instant, and with two seconds left, Batum was on the floor. The rest is just talk.
Clock stopped, ball at the table, someone never saw the block coming. It’s on the sheet.
It’s true, we checked: BeBasket.
