The girl with a curl in the middle of her forehead

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It is a lovely train ride from New York to Washington, D.C. It takes about three and a half hours, and when you factor in the time it takes to get out to one of the NY airports and into town from one of D.C.’s airports, as well as the time spent in the airport waiting in lines and getting searched, it turns out not to take much longer by train than to fly. There’s a lot of leg room, you can plug your computer into a regular outlet and you can visit the café car when you’re bored. Trains have a lot to recommend them. It was a relaxing way to start the day. But I didn’t stay relaxed for long.

The Sparks started the game against the Washington Mystics like we started against New York. We make things so much harder for ourselves by letting the first six to eight minutes get away from us. At one point in the first quarter our entire team was being beaten by Alana Beard by herself—she had all 13 of the Mystics’ points to our 2. It had the makings of a blowout. I was emboldened by the experience in New York though, where we had finally woken up and played hard and pulled out a win, so I did not totally give in to despair.

This game played out in many ways just like the New York game. We started off terribly cold. We shot only 20% in the first quarter, and almost all of our points were in the last 3 minutes. We played better in the second quarter (it would have been hard to be worse), but still not well. At one point in the second quarter, as the Mystics’ lead blossomed to 24, Carla e-mailed to ask me what the largest deficit had been that a team had overcome to win. “I think 30,” I sent back. “It’s not impossible yet.”

In fact, the Sparks made it clear they weren’t done fighting yet. In the third quarter, Shannon Bobbitt and Betty Lennox got the basketball to fall. Bobbitt made three of four shots in the quarter, including a 3–pointer and Lennox made both her shots. Slowly we crept within eight, then six. For the quarter, we outscored Washington 22-13, and brought ourselves within five points. If we could keep this up, we could steal this one.

We just needed one last big quarter. And we had exactly 6 and a half minutes of just that. We pushed and bullied and stole and ran and finally tied the score at 63 with three and a half minutes left in the game. I thought, “We’re going to do this again. We are going to crawl out of that deep hole we dug for ourselves and get another W.” But once we tied the game, we never scored again. The last three and a half minutes were all Washington, and then the game was over. Sparks handed another defeat, losing 75-63. I am still mulling over whether it is worse to be down by 24 and just let the game go or to be down by 24, pull all the way back to even and then lose anyway. I know the latter is much more of a heartbreaker.

When I was little, my mother often recited the rhyme of “the girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead: when she was good, she was very very good, but when she was bad, she was horrid.” I thought about that rhyme often during the game tonight, watching my team. We were horrid to start, and then suddenly we were very very good. So good, in fact, that we went from shooting 20% in the first quarter to 56% in the third; we went from down 24 to tied; we went from eight turnovers in the second quarter to two in the fourth. But we just couldn’t get it done, because when we were bad, we were horrid.

I have a lovely train ride back up the East Coast tomorrow. I will have a large contingent of family at the game at the Mohegan Sun on Tuesday. I am very much looking forward to seeing the very very good Sparks there.

-- Kathy Goodman