A kid has a basketball in his hands, dying moments of a game, open from a few steps beyond the 3-point line. In that moment he is a solitary figure, same as he was for a thousand hours in his driveway, same as he’s been for thousands of hours in gymnasiums, on playgrounds, in his imagination, just him, the ball, the rim.
And yet, if he is lucky, he isn’t alone at all.
Here was Matt MacDonald Tuesday night, 6-foot-5, 185 pounds, a freshman playing his eighth career game for the Fairleigh Dickinson Knights. Here he was, playing in the NIT, playing in the Rutgers Athletic Center, his team down 69-68, the mid-major from Bergen County throwing a scare into the big, bad state school, less than 30 seconds to play.
Twenty-five feet from the basket he set, aimed, fired.
“We had a chance to win the game,” he will say later, “and we’d only won once so far, so you have to take advantage of every opportunity you have. The ball just came to me, and I was open.”
He was open, but not alone.
A few hundred miles north, in the Buffalo suburb of Eggertsville, Matt’s father, Mike, and his brother, Nick, were driving home from a difficult loss in an eighth-grade CYO basketball tournament. Mike is the head coach at Medaille College, a terrific NCAA Division III program that has made six postseason tournaments in a row, and he moonlights as Nick’s coach for St. Benedict’s.
Nick’s teammates were going out for pizza afterward. He chose the car with his father.
“Let’s try to catch the end of Matt’s game,” he said.
So the father fiddled with the radio, remembering that Rutgers games were usually found at 710 on the AM dial. And there it was. Mike immediately dialed up his father, Jack, in New Milford, Conn., where he’d spent the night watching another grandson’s football game.
“Put on WOR,” Mike told Jack. Jack did that.
Soon, the calls started arriving furiously, from one brother, then another, then Matt’s AAU coach, then a few friends, all of them wanting to be the first to tell the news: FDU is giving Rutgers a heck of a fight! You should tune in!
“I’m trying,” Mike said.
By the time father and son pulled into the family driveway, Rutgers had that 69-68 lead and the reception, remarkably, sharpened to as clear as if the announcers were sitting in the back seat. Through the front window, Mike and Nick could see the rest of the family – mother Maura, brothers Patrick, 17, and Mark, 7 – staring intently at a computer screen, watching the fuzzy streaming video.
All of them hundreds of miles away from Piscataway. And all of them standing beside their brother, son, grandson, nephew as the clock bled under 30 seconds. Mike and Nick, in the car, in the driveway, decided to heed the advice of that Budweiser ad: It isn’t silly if it works. They stayed where they were.
And then the ball went in.
Son of a gun: the ball went in.
Matt MacDonald is a coach’s son, of course, so his first thought wasn’t to shake his fist or pound his chest; his first thought was: “Now we have to get a stop. If we get a stop, we’re going to win the game.”
Everyone else … they weren’t quite so sanguine. In the car, Mike and Nick high-fived and started blowing the horn like it was New Year’s Eve. Inside, the rest of the family celebrated similarly. Phones began to buzz. Emails were furiously exchanged. FDU got the stop it needed. The Knights won the game, 73-72, the kind of score that makes people pause when they see it crawl across the TV screen.
“A big win for us,” Matt said. “We needed to get something going.”
In August, he was planning on going to prep school because he hadn’t gotten a single scholarship offer after a fine career at Canisius High School. Then Greg Herenda, the Knights’ new coach, asked him to Teaneck for a visit. Now he starts. And Tuesday night …
“Make sure that’s a highlight,” his father counseled, “not the highlight.”
“I’m not going to reflect on anything until after the season,” Matt said. “But Coach Herenda believed in me. It was good to reward that faith.”
He flew to Buffalo Wednesday morning, barely needing the plane to get there. On Thursday, the MacDonalds will celebrate Thanksgiving officially, although the holiday really began with 25.8 seconds to play Tuesday night, when one of them launched a jump shot and a couple dozen others willed it home.