Basketball, the beautiful game.

Most of us all know this game. Yes, basketball. This game’s easy to play. There are 5 playing persons from each team. There would be two teams on the court, leading to a total of 10 members inside the court excluding referees and officials.

By name, in this game, you basket the ball into the net and earn 2 points for each score. If you hit far from some specified distance then you’d be rewarded with 3 points for a score. Well, in this article, I am not going to talk about all the rules and the way how it is played as it will get unconventionally long and I am surely not the right person (chuckles). What I shall be doing is sharing some beautiful memories that have been imprinted inside my mind during one of the tournaments that I participated in.

Recently our friends organized the inter-faculty basketball competition. As I belong to the Civil Engineering department, I had the opportunity to play representing the department along with my teammates. Loosing and winning a game is a secondary thing but the respect that we felt for each other after the game is something that needs to be illustrated. As someone who plays basketball frequently, I have seen the lack of coordination among many teams. Worse of all, sometimes an individual try to prove superior in the group and doesn't realize that it's a team play.

Our first game was with Pharmacy combined with Media. The only player from Media is Shiva, the sure shooter. If it had only been Pharmacy then we’d have dominated the game. But still with only key player Shiva to be blocked, we entered the court. First-quarter and second quarter ended with a scoreline of only 4-6, we being behind. But still our game was going well, I’ve to say we were dominating the game; the only problem with us was lack of sure shooter. Unfortunately, our score stopped till the fourth quarter and they ended with 19. We lost the game. That moment, I knew how my teammates felt.

That was an important game for us as, it was like a league game, Mechanical department was the superior one, as talked in the market and they too were in our group. So everyone thought of losing with this department and winning the rest of the game. We had lost with Pharmacy, and to qualify to lose a second game was hard for us.

The second game was played between the pharmacy and Mechanical department. Unfortunate for us, Pharmacy lost, as thought with Mechanical Department, but only with 2 points. By that, I had some feeling that we could’ve won over Mechanical Department.

The deciding game for us took place yesterday. I was feeling a sort of nervousness. It was "do or die" situation for us. If we lose the game then we’d lose, but if we win the game we’d still have a chance as all three teams would have same points in the league and the one entering semis would be decided on score difference.

The game began. Surprisingly, we took the lead. Well, we played well; we deserved to take the lead. But third-quarter was what I was afraid of. Our game always gets ruined in the third quarter. Before the beginning of the third quarter, we had taken 10 points lead. Third-quarter ended; still, we were leading the game. Finally, the final quarter (fourth) started, they began to bounce back. When only 1 minute was left, they made a score difference of 2 points only. But I still had some courage of hanging one minute anyhow. The game was rolling and finally at 30 seconds remaining we scored once more and I was sure to win. The countdown began 9,8,7,6……referee whistles and finally, we won the game. 

As difficult it was, but we defeated the Mechanical Department. I now, no more think whether we’d reach semi-finals or not. My team has defeated the claimed title winner. We were the underdogs for that game and how good it felt to be the underdogs, I learnt from that game.