Why the WNBA Gave Me Myself Back | Wonder in the Weeds

This week is more wonder than weeds, and I am not sorry about it.

I moved here almost a year ago and I have spent almost every day since trying to connect with people. Volunteering. Golf. Pickleball. Three book clubs. It honestly feels like homework.

Then the 4th of July came. Here in the US it is supposed to be this big patriotic thing, 250 years, fireworks, the whole deal. I was not feeling it. Not in a global sense, not with where this country is right now. And on a smaller scale, that used to be our day. We loaded the kids in the car before sunrise, drove to the beach, and stayed for sixteen hours. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, everyone in sweatshirts on the sand for the fireworks. We are nowhere near a beach now. We do not know enough people here to do anything like it.

That disconnection is the weeds this week.

So I went looking for the good, the way I always tell you to. And it turned out the good has been sitting right in front of me all summer. Sports.

The World Cup

My youngest is home for the summer and completely in it. I started watching games I had no reason to care about just to sit next to him. Then something else happened. Every time I open my phone the news is heavy and divisive, and the World Cup is the one thing cutting straight through that. I am crying over videos almost daily. A family walking to a watch party gets handed real tickets by a stranger. Mexico loses in Mexico, and the England fans spend the night talking about how incredible the Mexican fans were. Football fans do not have a reputation for kindness. That is what makes it land.

The Knicks

I am not an NBA person. I lived in that area for seventeen years and I know a lot of Knicks fans, and I watched New York get a week and a half of pure joy it badly needed. Nobody expected that team to get there. The whole thing read like a movie. Watching real Knicks fans, the ones from the Bronx and Queens, celebrate from a thousand miles away was contagious.

And then the Lynx

Here is where it got personal.

My oldest sister was a basketball person. She played before Title IX. She coached. She was a sports journalist before she got too sick to write. When the Mystics came to Washington in the late 90s she got season tickets and dragged me along, back when they hung blackout curtains over the empty upper bowl. She died a few years ago.