“Guys! I found it! I thought I lost it forever!” announced Trey Lyles happily as he walked onto the court for the pregame shootaround. In his hands was a tattered, squashed, and damp cardboard box.
“Did you steal that from a hobo on the street or something?” asked Jeff Withey, wrinkling his nose at the moldy reek. “I think I’m going to get AIDS just from standing near that thing. And you’re saying that you want it?”
Trey held up the box proudly, un-squashing it as he did so. “Look what it says on the side.” A few other teammates had gathered to see what the commotion was about.
Jeff squinted at the letters scrawled in black Sharpie. They were nearly illegible. Finally, he deciphered them. “Jumpshot? That’s your jumpshot box?”
“Yep!” replied Trey, hugging the box close to his chest. “I’ve been missing it since my junior year of high school, but I found it while digging around in my parent’s garage. Man, I would have been picked so much higher if I had found it sooner!”
“You can’t keep a jumpshot in a box,” observed Trevor Booker, eyebrows tilted in confusion. “It don’t work that way.”
Trey’s smile seemed to be permanently affixed to his face. “You’ll see when the game starts. Everybody was saying, ‘Oh, Trey doesn’t have a jumper,’ well, now I do. It’s right here in my hands.”
“If you say so,” said Trevor, shrugging.
“I’m going to go put this in my locker. It’s never leaving my possession again!” Trey trotted off to the visitor’s locker room with his prize in hand.
“I bet it doesn’t work,” Trevor said, as if trying to reassure himself. “No way.”
Jeff took a big sniff of the air. “Yep. I have AIDS.”