Why do I love Wake basketball? I was 13 the last time I actually played for an organized team, and all I remember from the experience is being ostracized for not wearing ankle socks. Since then, every attempt to join in a pick up game has ended with something resembling an asthma attack. Not a problem though, right? You can still be a basketball fanatic without athletic ability. Just study up on your X’s and O’s. Understand the game. But what if you lack the attention span to pore over stop motion graphics and Youtube videos of the flex, motion, Princeton, and spread? (I have no idea what those things are.) Worse yet, what if you don’t give a shit? Don’t worry, right? Just study up on the stats. Understand the game’s history and its current trends. But what if you hate numbers so much that your dad still begrudgingly does yours taxes? Ostensibly, there’s nothing left of the game to love. That’s my story. I’m emotionally attached to a zero sport: a cipher; a void; a nothingness. Yet every season I unload large pieces of my soul into this great abyss, and wager my equanimity (and my family’s) on the success of the Wake Forest basketball program. Why?

The answer’s obvious: it’s more than basketball. Don’t choke on the platitude. Clichés don’t mean much, but they’re often all we have access to. I’m well aware that aphorisms have the potential to induce nausea; empty signifiers often do that. But in the following paragraphs I will attempt to reify the abstract phrase, “It’s more than basketball,” by focusing on the sport’s ability to transcend frightening notions of temporality. Primarily, this analysis will focus on collegiate basketball’s employment of the palimpsestic narrative. In addition, I will spend some (although not much) time explicating why college basketball—not professional basketball or other collegiate sports—seems singularly adroit in writing the past onto the present.

First, a quick look at my own college narrative might serve as an appropriate starting place to open up some kind of space for an ensuing investigation of temporality. I received admission to both Vanderbilt and Wake Forest in 2001. Both of my parents had gone to Vandy, and I, the only son, planned on following in their footsteps. Suddenly came a change of heart. For years I have described this change of heart in a bizarre way. I told people that the young Hegelian (and Marxist) in me demanded that history progress teleologically. I told them that I thought attending Vanderbilt would only prove that history moves cyclically. I told them that I wanted to surpass my progenitors, and if I attended Vanderbilt my course could only move parallel with theirs. I told them bullshit. The real story makes me sound much less academic. Sadly, I can’t accurately tell you the real story, but I remember the salient details: a balmy Saturday in February; ESPN; the term “Screamin’ Demons”; cute college girls; a throbbing student section; and Broderick Hicks, Darius Songaila, and Josh Howard. I’m not sure which of those details I found most attractive (pray it wasn’t Hicks), but goddamn I wanted to be a contributing part of that ethos. It was chilling. My parents only had stories about watching their Commodores get drubbed year in and year out by far superior SEC teams. I wanted ACC madness, not SEC shellackings. I chose Wake Forest.

To some extent, this choice actually verifies the veracity of my first account. In many ways it represented my own forging ahead, my own progress, maybe even my own rebellion against history. It acted as the first moment I began carving out my own personal narrative. I think most of us can relate to this feeling of “college as trailblazing.” Of course I expect some outliers, but for many, college lives in memory as the most formative of years. In those years we learned to feed ourselves, to be punctual without maternal coercion, to “run game,” to mend a broken heart on our own, and never to drink the trash can punch. We read books that our high schools had banned, we awed at the nighttime glow of Wait Chapel, we met people who were smarter than us, we rushed, we pledged, we hazed, we royally fucked up, we responsibly un-fucked up (maybe), and, hopefully, we grew up. But in between these critical moments, we strapped on our old gold and black tie-dye t-shirts, walked to the Joel, wrapped our arms around friends and strangers, and rocked back and forth beneath spotlights and the din of a Harley. (Then we heckled the shit out of Gary Williams.)

In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the unnamed narrator addresses his invisibility and its relationship with time. He muses, “Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat.” For me, the games at the Joel acted as the steady and unwavering beat of time. In constant flux, players came and went, games were won and lost, but the games themselves and the spirit of them never ceased to exist. At a more personal level, as I struggled with my own chaos—maturation—the Demon Deacons served as a grounding device: a reminder of my own dreams actualized. I may not have been developing into exactly what I imagined, but I had become a part of that ethos…“goddamn.”

Surprisingly, once I “matured,” graduated, and moved on, Wake basketball continued to effect me much like the memory of an ex-girlfriend: nostalgia canoodling with an understanding of time’s necessity to keep moving. The adult world is fast, too damn fast. The speed—the rapid passing of time—often frightens me. But my history and the reminder of my burgeoning sense of self-hood still exist in the palimpsest that is Wake Forest basketball.

Quickly, a palimpsest is a piece of parchment or vellum with multiple layers of writing present. When one scientifically analyzes this kind of manuscript, he can see the traces of the original text, which, at some point, was effaced to make room for newer writing; thus, it acts as a living piece of history with the past completely present.

When I go to the Joel, I see the images of Tim Duncan, I see the living breathing Randolph Childress, I see old gold and black, I see the Deacon; essentially, I see the past written on the present. Even though that past has been effaced by my own history, its traces still exist. Therefore, my own history also presently exists in traces. Thus, time is, in fact, not moving progressively or cyclically at all. Time is only present; there is only now. I may no longer be at the Joel for every game, but those beats of time continue to tick just as they did when I was an undergrad. My own narrative (and, perhaps, parts of my own self) still live and thrive along side both your own personal past and the present experiences of the current students. Wake Basketball offers me solace by suggesting that the past is now, the present is now, and the future is now. More importantly, Wake Basketball has shown me that esoteric literary theory can actually function in my life. I experience the past, present, and future every game I watch. The result is utter harmony that announces the immediacy of existence.

I don’t have the same intense feeling of immediacy when watching other sports. I have weak theories to explain this. Football has an impersonal and distant aura that makes it difficult to connect with. The players are covered in armor and there are like 4,000 of them. Basketball, on the other hand, resonates with me because of its simplicity. I can remember—and therefore connect with—the five starters from any particular Wake basketball season. As for professional sports, I think the value of the palimpsestic narrative can apply if one’s most formative and pivotal moments occurred with that professional team. I don’t know though. College memories, as stated earlier, have a special power.

In effect, the temporal immediacy that Wake Forest basketball enforces allows me to love it without being an erudite sports fanatic. Its ability to mitigate the fear that accompanies thoughts of my 30th birthday is exactly why I invested countless hours into a floundering squad with only seven scholarship athletes. I may never be worth a shit as a sports analyst, but I will never stop loving Wake Forest Basketball. Go Deacs!