The postseason did not arrive like a storm.
It arrived like a held breath that the entire building had been sharing for weeks, until one morning the breath was simply no longer being held. The standings locked. The first-round opponent resolved into a specific name and a specific style and a specific set of threats that Coach broke down on the whiteboard with the flat affect of a man who had already lost two nights of sleep to the tape. The locker room smelled different—sharper, more metallic, as if the residual adrenaline of the regular season had been distilled into something that could stain the air itself.
I noticed the change in Damian first.
Not in his play. His play remained the same controlled violence it had always been. The change lived in the smaller margins: the way he sat o
