Our refrigerator door is covered with NCAA tournament brackets as the Men’s National Championship is in session.  I’m glad to have at least a passing interest in basketball since other family members are serious fans.  My husband takes over the television with no negotiation for other programming on game nights. He studies the brackets harder than our income tax return.  Life will be all ball for a while now

Every year I have this reoccurring thought about the tournament and the way it progresses to the final game.  Of the 64 teams invited to “The Big Dance,” 63 of them will end up in the loser’s bracket.  That is a humongous amount of grief and tears and disappointment.  One team alone will escape that agony of defeat; 98.9 percent of the teams will fail somewhere along the route.  The tournament is more about losing than winning.

A single basketball experience allows me to identify with those in fierce competition.  My one season ended dramatically for me, a seventh grade bench warmer on an eighth grade team.  I’m sure I put some gray hairs on my coach’s head in the last tournament game where our team trembled before the favored school of piranhas no team in the league had beaten.  I lounged spraddle-legged on the end of bench knowing my shoes would never touch the court that night.

By a miracle our team stayed in the game and the score was close even into the fourth quarter.   Because the game was so physical, we were fouling excessively.  Two girls fouled out and better subs than I filled the ranks.  Then another starter fell, and I gasped when the girl next to me hit the court.  Coach looked my way in despair as her last hope fouled out.  Her expression read, help me please!

One minute I sat peacefully watching people in the bleachers; the next minute I trotted onto the court where a girl twice my size, gritting her teeth, said mean things about me and invaded my personal space.  Somehow, I woke up.  Maybe the other team didn’t take me seriously, but whatever the reason, I simply reached out and took the ball away from the mean girl.  In my peripheral vision, I saw Coach screaming, drive! Drive!

With mean girl very upset with me I dribbled hard toward our goal and did a perfect layup—in my mind.  In reality I ran straight toward the goal and flung the ball up against the backboard to get rid of it before that growling girl killed me.  I remember Coach covering her face with her hands and shaking her head.  I let her down; I failed.  For a long time after that I felt sick thinking about that game.

That one experience gives me empathy toward those players who have the opportunity to score the final stellar shot to win a game, but they fail.  They let down their team.  Head bowed, they take the long walk back to the locker room while the crowd’s moan rings in their ears. They taste bitter failure.

Once the game is played it’s over, no going back and doing it over, no second chances.  How we deal with the failure is most important.  Michael Jordan said, “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career.  I’ve lost almost 300 games.  Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed.  I’ve failed over and over again in my life.  And that is why I succeed.”

It’s basketball, but it’s also life. How we deal with failure charts the course of our future.  I like Paul’s attitude in Philippians 3:13:  “. . .but one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”  On the open court of life, that’s the best win.