A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE DUNK
To understand how the modern dunk came to exist, we must first go back. Far, far back. Back before Dr. Naismith first nailed a peach basket to the wall of his gymnasium, back even before the first human was pitted against another in a sporting contest. Before the dawn of man, before multicellular life, before Earth had coalesced from the detritus of space, before space itself came to be. We must venture beyond all these things.
Yes, our story starts before the universe itself was formed in the magnificent cataclysm known as the “Big Bang”.
Before all of these meddlesome things came to be, the concept of a “slam dunk” existed in pure form as an idea unhindered by the burden of intelligence-possessing beings attempting to comprehend it. In the nothingness that existed pre-Big Bang, there was actually a somethingness, and that somethingness was dunking.
For you see, an idea is perfectly capable of existing even in the total absence of beings able to process that idea; in fact, an idea can exist even without matter, time, physics, or any of the other things that we consider to comprise “reality”, for an idea is none of these things.
Of course, the concept of a “slam dunk” is useless when neither distance nor matter are present. Yet, so is the idea that 1+1=2, yet nobody would argue that point even when there exists nothing to count.
It would be a long time before the dunk gained relevance as a tangible, discrete event. In the interim, the universe organized itself into galaxies, and matter as we know it was birthed from the protonic haze. During this time, some of the movements of atoms, molecules, and entire celestial bodies could loosely be classified as dunks. However, a dunk, by definition, requires intent. As none of these actions were undertaken by entities guided by purpose, none of them could truly be called a “slam dunk”.
It would be ignorant to assume that life on Earth predated life elsewhere in the universe; certain planetary systems achieved stability well before our own. It is with the inception of life that a true “slam dunk” became more than just an idea.
So it came to be that the first dunk was thrown down by an unnamed amoeba on a planet later known to its inhabitants as Thaul-Ratos, when that amoeba used its protoplasm to envelop a bacterium. There exist no replays of this event and there were no witnesses who were aware of the ramifications of the act, but it definitely happened.
To recount all the amoebic dunks that occurred in the wake of the first would not only be an uninteresting task; it would also be impossible. For brevity’s sake, we will zoom forward a few billion more years. That’s when the fun starts.
TO BE CONTINUED