The clock read three seconds.
Aaron was back to the basket in the right low post with the ball clamped against his chest and Scottie Wilbekin's body pressed against his back, the Florida guard's arms extended to the sides searching for the contact that would signal the exact moment Aaron decided to move.
The entire arena was on its feet.
"I'll tell you what I'm going to do," Aaron said in a low voice without turning his head, loud enough for Wilbekin to hear. "I'm going to fake left, then fake right, gather myself, and finish with a dunk."
Wilbekin didn't answer, but Aaron felt his body tense behind him.
Aaron leaned his shoulder to the left.
Wilbekin reacted immediately, shifting his weight toward that side, and in that exact instant, Aaron faked to the right with the same movement. The double feint left the Florida guard cross-footed, his momentum split between two directions, neither of which was correct.
Aaron spun to the right.
Wilbekin tried to recover his position, but the momentum he had spent on the two previous fakes was no longer available. The second Florida defender was coming from the weak side, but he was arriving late.
The path to the rim was open. He took two steps, elevated off the floor with both feet, and when he reached the height of the rim, he extended his right arm and slammed the ball against the glass with all the strength left in his body.
The horn sounded while the ball was still in the air.
It went in.
74-59 Kentucky.
Rupp Arena exploded.
The sound arrived in a wave from the student section toward the upper tiers, twenty-four thousand people processing the end of the game at the same time.
Julius arrived first from the left side, bumping fists with Aaron before the latter had even finished landing. Behind him came Andrew Harrison, Aaron Harrison, and the rest of the bench, which had leaped from their seats as soon as the horn sounded.
"You said it and you did it!" Julius shouted over the stadium noise, looking at Aaron with an expression between disbelief and laughter.
"It always works," Aaron said.
On the sideline, Calipari had a smile he couldn't prevent. He turned to Antigua and said something that was completely drowned out by the stadium noise.
On the court, the Florida players retreated toward the tunnel with the expression of those who had just lost a game they believed they could win. Donovan crossed the floor to shake Calipari's hand—brief and direct—and followed his players without looking at the scoreboard.
In the broadcast booth, Tom Hart waited for the noise to drop enough. "74-59 for the Kentucky Wildcats," he said. "Kentucky defeats Florida, now becoming the number one team in the country, at Rupp Arena. Undefeated on the season. And the player who defined this game tonight is beyond any possible debate."
"Aaron Reed," Jon Sundvold said without waiting for Hart to finish. "24 points tonight. 11 assists, most of them in the first half when he decided to become the engine of the offense instead of hunting his own shot, creating possessions for Julius and the Harrisons that Florida could never fully anticipate."
"12 rebounds," Sundvold continued, "6 offensive and 6 defensive, controlling the glass on both ends of the floor throughout the entire game. And 3 blocks, all three at critical moments when Florida needed a basket to get back into the game, and on every one of them, Reed was the reason that basket didn't happen."
"We also have to add," Sundvold said, "that all those numbers came in a game where Florida designed a strategy specifically to limit him. With Prather glued to him for the entire second half and double-teams in the post. With all of that on his shoulders, those are the numbers Aaron Reed delivers to us. Player of the game. Beyond any possible debate."
"Beyond any possible debate," Tom Hart said.
The Kentucky locker room was something else entirely.
Julius entered first, and before the others had finished crossing the threshold, he was already talking.
"We put fifteen points on them right here in our house!" he said, striking his locker door with the palm of his hand.
"And at home!" Andrew Harrison added from the other side of the locker room.
"And at home!" Julius repeated, pointing at him.
Julius reappeared a moment later with two bottles of water and tossed one to Aaron from across the locker room.
"Did you know you were going to be able to do that?" he asked, referring to the final dunk.
"More or less," Aaron said.
Julius made a face of disbelief.
"You told him exactly what you were going to do."
"Yeah."
"And you did it!"
"That's why I said it."
Julius shook his head slowly. "Sometimes I don't know if you're the calmest guy in the world or just the weirdest."
Aaron didn't respond to that.
Calipari entered a moment later and waited for the noise to drop a level. "Alright," he said. "This is exactly what I came to see when I came to Kentucky. A team that plays 40 complete minutes against the best opponent we've faced so far this season." He paused. "Enjoy it tonight. You deserve it. Tomorrow we get back to work."
James Young passed by Aaron's locker and tapped him lightly on the shoulder.
"Hey," he said. "With a healthy ankle, I would have been the one throwing down that dunk."
Aaron nodded with a half-smile.
"That dunk," he said, shaking his head.
"Thanks," Aaron said.
Aaron had a smile as he responded to teammates approaching him. It was a real smile.
Alex Poythress came over and bumped fists without saying anything. Andrew told him something about Prather's defense in the final minutes, and the two spoke about it for a moment. Julius was still on the other side of the locker room repeating the story of the final dunk to anyone willing to listen.
"He told him what he was going to do!" Julius could be heard saying, gesturing toward Aaron's locker. "He told him exactly what he was going to do, and he did it anyway!"
Aaron made no gesture in that direction.
Julius saw him from the other end of the locker room and shouted his name.
"Hey brother! Did you see Wilbekin's face when you blew past him?" Julius picked his way through their teammates, gesturing with his hands. "The guy was completely paralyzed."
"I saw it," Aaron said.
"And did you really tell him what you were going to do before doing it?"
"Yeah."
"And why?"
Aaron thought for a moment.
"To see if he believed it."
Julius looked at him for a second and then let out a laugh.
It vanished the moment he left the locker room. It wasn't deliberate. It was just that inside the locker room, the noise occupied the space where thoughts would have otherwise resided, and once that noise remained on the other side of the door, the thoughts returned.
And what returned was Tuesday's phone call.
It had happened four days before the Florida game, at ten-fifteen at night. Julius was at the gym, and Aaron was alone in the room when the phone vibrated on the desk.
The name on the screen was Hannah.
"Hello," she said.
"Hello," Aaron answered.
The conversation lasted twenty-two minutes. Aaron remembered it in full, every part of it, even though in the following days he had tried several times not to remember it.
Hannah talked about how Columbia was being more demanding than she had anticipated.
About how there were weeks where Tuesdays felt like the only moment of breathing room between practices and exams.
About how calling Aaron after an exhausting day, only for him to also be exhausted, had turned their conversations into something both completed out of obligation rather than something both sought out.
About how there were nights when she hung up the phone feeling they had talked for twenty minutes without either of them truly having been present in the conversation.
About how she was starting to forget what it was like to talk to him when both of them had energy.
About how she missed that.
She paused. Outside the room's window, the campus was quiet.
"I'm just tired of all this," she said. "You're over there, and I'm over here."
"And?" Aaron said.
"You're a thousand kilometers away."
Aaron didn't answer for several seconds.
"I'm not telling you this to hurt you," Hannah said.
"I know," Aaron said.
"I've felt it too," Aaron said when the silence grew too long. "About the conversations."
"I know," Hannah responded. "That's what makes this hard."
"I don't know if this has a solution right now," Hannah said near the end. "I don't know if we can keep doing this until June and have both of us be fine when we get there."
"What are you saying?" Aaron said.
"I think it's best to pause," Hannah said. "For now. Until things are clearer for both of us."
The call ended.
The phone screen displayed the duration for a few seconds before going dark.
Aaron left the phone on the desk and remained sitting in front of it for several minutes without moving. Hannah's name remained visible on the phone screen showing the duration of the call before turning off.
When Julius returned from the gym with his bag over his shoulder and asked what was for dinner, Aaron answered that he didn't know, and both left the room heading to the cafeteria to grab something to eat on the way. Julius talked about the week's practices and a Tennessee player he had seen in a video whom he thought was overrated. Aaron answered just enough to keep the conversation going.
Everything as if those last twenty-two minutes hadn't happened.
Aaron slept that night without Julius noticing anything. He knew because Julius, whenever he noticed something, always said so.
That was what had been behind every possession of the last four days. Not in a way that interfered with the game. But in a way that every time the game ended and the noise stopped covering the silence, what came back was that call and Hannah's voice telling him that it was best to pause.
He hadn't told anyone. Not Julius. Not Drew. Not his mother.
The days following that call had the specific texture of weeks when one carries something inside and prefers not to think about it.
Wednesday's practice was the longest of the week. Calipari worked them for three hours with barely any rest between sets. Aaron welcomed the exhaustion.
On Thursday, they repeated defensive rotations for two hours. On Friday, Aaron answered three messages from his mother with brief replies. On Saturday was the game.
Forty minutes of a game against the number-one team in the country was enough noise to make anything else wait.
Aaron reached the room before Julius and sat on the edge of the bed. He dropped his bag to the floor and rested his elbows on his knees. From the window, part of the campus was still illuminated by daylight. Groups of students were moving between buildings, some likely heading where everyone was going after a game like that.
The plan was to lie down, turn off the lights, and let his body recover while his head did whatever it could with the rest.
The door opened twenty minutes later.
Julius entered with the energy of someone who still had the game surging through him. He set his bag by his bed, changed his shirt, and turned to Aaron. "Party," he said.
Aaron didn't answer.
Julius waited.
"Tonight. At one of the baseball guys' houses. Everyone's going to be there." He paused. "Everyone."
"I'm tired," Aaron said.
Julius looked at him for a moment.
"You just threw down a buzzer-beating dunk against one of the best basketball programs in the country."
"I know."
"And you're tired."
"Yeah."
Julius sat on the edge of his bed directly facing him. "Aaron. Don't be boring. A game like this isn't celebrated every day."
"A victory against one of our biggest rivals at Rupp Arena," Julius continued. "Undefeated on the season. And you want to stay here."
"I wasn't going to stay here."
"What were you going to do then?"
Aaron didn't answer.
"Exactly," Julius said.
Aaron looked at the floor in front of him for a moment.
He thought of the room with the lights off and the silence that would follow, with everything that silence brought with it.
He thought of Tuesday's call.
He thought that staying alone with that tonight probably wasn't going to solve anything anyway.
Then he thought that Julius was right about at least one thing: a game like that didn't happen every day.
"One hour," Aaron said.
Julius was already up. "As many as it takes," he answered, grabbing the team jacket from the back of the chair.
Aaron stood up as well.
He grabbed the jacket lying on the bed.
He thought that maybe Julius was right. That staying here with the lights off wasn't going to change anything that had happened on Tuesday.
And that maybe a night of noise was exactly what he needed.
Maybe a party wasn't such a bad idea.
Authors thought
To be honest, I feel like his relationship with Hannah had hit a rut, so I decided to have them break up outside of the episode and have Aaron go through a phase of womanizing and acting out. Let me know what you think.
What did you think of today's chapter? Give me your opinions and thoughts.
For football fans, check out my other fanfic, *The Golden Standard*, and discover the story of Wyatt Sterling.
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