When the plumbers had our floor opened up in the back of the office and the smell of sewage filled the building yesterday afternoon, Tim and I went for a walk around downtown. We walked over to Central and then walked a few blocks west on it, until we crossed the street and headed north and walked to the Main Library. After I picked up a book on hold, we continued walking north until we were by City Hall, where we walked through a narrow corridor between it and the City Center by it until we walked emerged on the city plaza, where a few homeless people loitered and pedestrians walked.

In the center of the plaza, under blue skies and bright sunlight, we stopped and watched four teenage boys playing two-on-two basketball on one of the hoop units installed there.

Seeing them playing made me think about how it was not so long ago I was glad to spend an afternoon out in the sun running, jumping and sweating with whoever else was out and around and wanted to play basketball.

And on our block, we had a number of guys who liked to play, which made for some serious hooping.

For me, it was the best from when I was a 7th grader through when I was a sophomore. All the usual cast of characters were still in the neighborhood at that time, and most of them were outside at someone’s driveway on any given evening, with a basketball.

Jimmy lived around the corner and a half a block away, but we could see his house from our house, so he counted as being on our block. He was a high school upperclassman when I first started coming outside to join the nightly play, and he was the pronounced king of the court. He was tall and had a natural shot and could ball handle, and at times he liked to toy with us younger kids when a pick up game broke out, but he was also competitive, and he had a tendency to be on the winning team when a game was played.

Across the street from our house, Eric and Chris were brothers, and it was usually their driveway that collected the neighborhood kids. Their driveway was a longish two-car slab with a pretty shallow slope, and they had a nice rim and backboard set mounted centrally on the house. Chris was my age, and Eric was two years older than Chris, so he was a natural to be good friends with Jimmy, when they were around us on the basketball court. Though a little stocky, Eric was more athletic than Chris, and Eric also had a pretty natural shot. Often games of HORSE would start with 4 or 5 people on the court, and they would end with Eric and Jimmy as the last players alive, taking crazy long shots or doing magical layups to try and knock each other out. Eric was good at the long range bombs- shots taken from out in the street beyond the driveway of his house. Jimmy was just good at everything. Chris would play basketball because the other kids were there playing iy, but he was less into it. Half the time, Eric and Chris would get into a yelling match at each other, because that’s how they rolled. Occasionaly my sister would get into the mix, when we’d play two-on-two or three-on-three or later, 21.

Those were fun years for me because they were the most athletic, active years of my life, I think. When I was in 7th grade, I was tall for my age and gangling and I wore thick glasses and I moved slow because my body was growing and my coordination was off, and I wasn’t very good playing pickup basketball. Springs and summers and falls came and went, and in the neighborhood, we went through periods of playing hoops a lot, because there were the bodies, and there was the interest, and it turned out to be fun. I turned the ball over a lot and had problems hanging on to the ball at times, but I just kept coming out to join everyone playing.

During and after 8th grade, though, my coordination improved, and I was taller, and practice by myself and with the YMCA team had made me quicker and more fundamentally sound. When there weren’t neighborhood games going on, I spent a lot of time on the driveway of our house, shooting free throws, practicing layups, developing a nice close-in hook shot.

By the time summer rolled around and Eric and Jimmy convened court at the Johnson’s house, I was less of a kid and more challenging to play. I finally had a short range jumper which did not usually get blocked by a quick Jimmy any more. I was learning to box out, and to use my height to rebound. I could dribble decently, and became good at threading passes, and even willing to drive to the hoop if a gap opened to lay one up.

By the time I was an underclassman in high school, I had made the freshman team at school, and I was in the nest shape of my young life. I was not the star of the team, by any means, but I was a contributor when I played, and I found when I joined pick up games at the outdoor courts of my old middle school or an open gym at another school, I was pretty good. I was never a consistent shooter, but on some days when I stepped out on the court, I could not be stopped. Shots fell, I had energy, and I made some killer passes to teammates that led to quick points.

For a short period in the summer between my 9th and 10th grade years, when I played neighborhood ball with Eric and Jimmy and Chris and whoever else joined in, I felt like I was finally good enough to be playing with them. I would never be quite as good as them, but I knew when I played two-on-two or three-on-three or 21 with them, I made it challenging for them, or made whichever one of them whose team I was on happy to have me as their guty. And once in a while, in 21, I even won.

Those are good memories. How many afternoons we ran game after game while the sun beat down on us, and we sweat heavily and cooled by a chance breeze. We would play until the sun dropped and there finally wasn’t enough light for us to make out the rim and backboard any more. Sometimes you felt light and sharp and dominating. Sometimes you felt bumbling and overran and angry. There was bickering about fouls and “jumps”. There were days you couldn’t get a shot off because Jimmy wold send them all into the yard or the street. And there were days where you tipped Jimmy’s shot, stopping him from scoring another bucket.

It was quite a reset to see those kids out playing on the plaza yesterday. I thought, “Man, I used to do that.” And then I thought, “I probably still could.”

And then I remembered I was like them, 30 years ago.

Oh, to be young.