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Lessons from the Toy Department

It happened in February in upstate New York, but it’s the best kind of March Madness for me. If you haven’t seen the video yet – and even if you’re not a hoops-head like I am – you might want to take a look. It aired nationally as a CBS News item, which you can view here. It’s a feel-good story, and let me be the first to say that THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT! Life’s too short for cynicism.

The “Miracle at Greece Athena High” — as I once said to my dear Marge-in-law about the film Hoop Dreams — has hoops in it but “it’s not really about basketball”. (She rolls her eyes still.) This is about inclusion and kindness, good leadership, the sweet side of group (not mob) psychology, and the beauty of sport at its best. It’s not about basketball; it’s about an autistic kid finding acceptance and worthiness, even before his ridiculous run of sharpshooting success. I commend it to any four-minute attention span you can summon. No eye-rolling allowed.

(I wrote more on this later in the week, which you can view in the Sports! section here or in the longer piece I wrote for “On Second Thought” accessible by a simple click here. Speaking of wonders, how ’bout this miraculous clicking? Whew! And to think it only took me a few months to get the hang of this stuff.)