On Katie Heindl’s “Basketball Feelings”

FOUR MONTHS INTO the pandemic, desperate for any form of live entertainment, my husband and I started watching the NBA bubble in Orlando. Up to then, there had been little to suggest that, on the brink of my 40th birthday, I would become obsessed with men’s professional basketball. But in 2020, two great forces converged, making the previously unimaginable (or at least highly unlikely) a sudden reality: a global pandemic that opened a giant sinkhole where my daily routine once stood, and the Pelicans—the NBA team based in my hometown, New Orleans—drafting Zion Williamson, a once-in-a-generation talent who combined a Shaq-like physique with Michael Jordan–like dunking abilities.