The Best Wild Cat There Ever Was

A lynx is agile. Has keen senses, excellent vision. They meow and growl. This wild cat is the best there ever was.

Was. The tense shifts while nobody's watching.

The franchise began in 1999, which in women's professional sports might as well be the Mesozoic. Most leagues fold after three and a half years—a life cycle shorter than a presidential term, than high school, than the time it takes to pay off a car. This one survived twenty-five years. Not through magic or smart marketing but through the specific stubbornness of women who were told no so many times that yes became irrelevant. They just kept showing up.

Tuesday, 3:47 PM. Practice should have ended at three-thirty but nobody notices. The coach watches them run play forty-three—a pick and roll that dissolves into something gorgeous and unnamed. They could run it unconscious. Light breaks through gymnasium windows and turns their bodies into stained glass. Amber where morning sweat dried during extra shooting drills. Silver where fresh perspiration rises through fabric. The purple-green-yellow map of bruises finding their way back to skin.

She opens her mouth to say something about dominance but her throat makes a sound like a door that doesn't want to close. What comes out: "I don't want this to—" She stops. They know. She doesn't mean the dominance. She means them. These five. This particular constellation of women who learned each other's breathing patterns, whose bodies anticipate each other like migrating birds know magnetic north.

The franchise has won 70.1% of their games across twelve seasons. For context: the Lakers peaked at 68.2% during their untouchable years. Jordan's Bulls managed 64.7%. The greatest dynasty in men's basketball never touched what these women built. But excellence conjugates differently in the feminine—they achieve, they accomplish, they never simply dominate. Language does its quiet work of diminishment.

Fifth title. That's what they're hunting before the expansion draft scatters them—Portland, Atlanta, Chicago, somewhere in Texas nobody's decided yet. The general manager has a spreadsheet that factors age, salary, potential. It doesn't factor the way number twelve knows exactly when number four needs help without looking. Doesn't have a column for how the center's laugh makes everybody play ten percent better. Can't calculate what happens when you separate women who've been breathing in synchrony for seven years.

Last year matters and doesn't matter. Five bad calls in the final game. The referee looking directly at the foul, swallowing the whistle. The point guard's body hit hardwood and the sound carried to the parking lot where later she'd scream at her steering wheel until her voice turned to whispers. The center stood in the shower until the hot water ran out, then kept standing, watching the walls like they might explain something. The forward sat in the arena garage for two hours, engine off, memorizing the concrete's particular patterns of oil stains and cracks.

That whistle lives in their bodies now. Every ankle remembers its inversions. The forward's surgically repaired shoulder predicts weather better than any forecast—rain in twelve hours means the ache starts now. Number thirty-two tore her ACL in February. That wet branch sound. She came back in October with titanium in her knee. Sets off airport security. Jokes about it. Doesn't joke about the dreams where her leg dissolves beneath her like sugar in water.

Watch how they play. Not the game—the spaces between. The point guard doesn't need to look before passing because her body knows—in its atoms, in the calcium of her bones—exactly where the shooting guard will be. This isn't strategy. It's closer to how birds murmurate, how fish school. Five women becoming one organism through repetition so constant it becomes autonomic, like breathing during a full-court press, like the heartbeat that accelerates before the ball leaves the shooter's hands.

The rookies on the bench memorize everything. Who needs coffee before speaking. Whose left knee requires extra tape on humid days. The specific way the coach's voice changes when she's scared but trying not to show it. They're studying for a test that's already over, learning a language that's about to become extinct.

In the lost and found box: a jersey from six years ago. Number twenty-one. That player's in Los Angeles now. The janitor keeps meaning to throw it away but doesn't. Some things insist on being kept.

The parking lot is empty except for them. The rookie realizes she left her keys inside, has to bang on the door until the janitor hears. They wait with her. Nobody says much. The center's stomach growls and the forward offers her a protein bar that's been in her bag since October. It tastes like cardboard and peanut butter. She eats it anyway.

When the rookie finally gets her keys, they separate to their cars but don't leave. Sit there with engines running. The point guard rolls down her window and yells something about Thursday's flight time. They all know the flight time. She's really saying something else.

One by one they drive away. Tomorrow they'll be back. Same time. Same place. The lynx will remember how to hunt in a pack for a little while longer.

That's enough.

That has to be enough.