from Will Blythe's To Hate Like This Is To Be Happy Forever

from To Hate Like This Is To Be Happy Forever: A Thoroughly Obsessive, Intermittently Uplifting, and Occasionally Unbiased Account of the Duke-North Carolina Basketball Rivalry by Will Blythe:

When I came into the house, my mother was listening to the postgame show on the radio. "Well, some days you are the pigeon and some days you are the statue," Tom Brennan, the Vermont coach, was saying. "Nobody has done that to us in two years."

"That's the kind of game I like," my mother said. "Not too close."

We sat into the night, watching an old detective drama on TV. "You don't see Perry Mason much anymore," she said.

"That could be because he's dead," I said.

She shot me a look that may have said, "Welcome home." Then again, it may not have said that.

I was tired. It felt good to lean back on the couch in my mother's house, my childhood home, the lulling voice of the dead Raymond Burr droning on about some wicked socialite with a talent for murder. My mother and I were going to spend a season watching basketball together. How many mothers and sons got to do that?