“I can’t imagine anything I wouldn’t do for Dwyane,” he says.

Wade, bleeding, fell at Haslem’s feet after Hansbrough’s hard foul. The game and series were still close then, though Miami would outscore Indiana 86-58 immediately after Haslem’s retaliation on Hansbrough and would extinguish the Pacer season in Indiana the game after that, an angry Wade providing the 17-for-25 punctuation that will echo throughout Indiana’s offseason. Wade got on the team flight with game ball in hand after finishing Indiana with 41 points and 10 rebounds, and he asked his rowdy teammates to please quiet down as he handed that symbolic ball over to Haslem.

“For my brother,” Wade said for all to hear. “For his sacrifice. I don’t think we win this series without him.”

“Way to cook their asses,” Haslem told Wade."

"I used to think the Blazers needed a charismatic, energetic, gunslinger like Kevin Pritchard. But then I was reminded that two of the most respected men in the business -- San Antonio's R.C. Buford and Oklahoma City's Sam Presti -- got their teams in the Western Conference Finals not because they were the life of the party, but rather because they were the smartest people at the party."

"So how, then, do they make their decisions? Turns out, every pass play is a pure demonstration of human feeling. Scientists have in recent years discovered that emotions, which are often dismissed as primitive and unreliable, can in fact reflect a vast amount of information processing. In many instances, our feelings are capable of responding to things we're not even aware of, noticing details we don't register on a conscious level."

"THERE IS BUT ONE GAME
& THAT GAME IS BASEBALL"

"As Moss was leaving the players’ parking lot, he rolled down the window of his BMW SUV and told a female reporter, “Work is over, baby, we’re outta here.”"

"In a rare and candid interview, the former top pick in the NBA draft discusses his injury-plagued career."

"The truth is, I would have loved to be able to man up. In fact, most of the time I did — presenting as chirpy a disposition as possible so that others would remain upbeat. But that can be exhausting, and if the proper outlet fails to surface — deadly."

"As training camp continued, and the internal conversations about signing Crawford heated up, McMillan had grown irritated. Entering his seventh season in Portland, McMillan had transformed the franchise from laughingstock to respectability by placing team above all. Nothing he was hearing from Crawford suggested he would be a team player. His gut told him not to endorse signing Crawford."

"“Early retirement” sounds wonderful. It certainly did that cold night in Pittsburgh. I was going to use my time to conquer the world.

"Boy, was I wrong. Now I find myself in music chat rooms arguing the validity of Frank Zappa versus the Mars Volta. (If the others only knew Walkingpnumonia was the screen name for a former All-Pro football player and not some Oberlin College student trying to find his place in the world.) I wrote a book. I set sail on the picturesque and calming waters of Bodymore, Murdaland. And when I’m in dire straits, I do what any 8-year-old does; I kick a soccer ball against the garage hoping somebody feels sorry and says, “Hey, want to play?”

"With millions of Americans out of work or doing work for which they are overqualified, I consider myself lucky. But starting from scratch can be unsettling. If you’re not prepared for it, retirement can become a form of self-imposed exile from the fulfillment and the exhilaration of knowing you did a good job."

Artists Christopher Gideon and Elissa Goldstone live and work miles apart. Yet, they love the same game. The two sat down to discuss baseball and its role within the stadium of contemporary art.

In the past, I've been as guilty as anyone else of turning a blind eye to racist things people have said to me. For the most part, I have nodded along with the calculus that says that because "our people" have achieved and because we "didn't have it as bad as others," we should just shut up and point to the scoreboard of Ivy League admissions. Or whatever. But a career of deflections and rationalizations leaves a residue. Linsanity, and everything ugly that inevitably came with it, has given us cause to clear our throats and expunge what can sometimes feel like a lifetime of silence and compromise.

THE TWO SISTERS shared a bed, and each night, with their hearts hammering, they would listen for the turn of the knob and the push of the door.

Like Jin before him, what Jeremy Lin represents is a re-conception of our bodies, a visible measure of how the emasculated Asian-American body might measure up to the mythic legion of Big Black supermen.

For this particular revenge fantasy, our hero needed to be able to understand every single racist thing said to him on the court and respond by dropping 30.

Still, there was something there. He showed the human side -- if for just a brief moment. And it made me feel something about Jim Harbaugh that I had not felt since I began covering him.

"The chicken runs at midnight."

"Out on the field they might be just killing you, calling you names, yelling at you," Akers says. "But then you go into lunch and they become completely different people. 'How's the family, David?' And you want to go, 'Wait a minute! You just torched me out there!' But that's how it is. Their teams are families."

When he runs down the field, what is his state of mind?

“I don't think there is a state of mind. To tell you the truth, it's pretty much all blank until the play is over. It's almost like a rush that you can't really describe. When you make the hit or the play's over, you kind of snap back into reality. It's a surreal feeling when you're running down there.”

"You can walk away from someone who doesn't love you. And you can walk away from someone you don't love. But when the love is mutual," Roy said. "The hardest thing is to walk away."

The coaches were eating breakfast when their unexpected recruit walked in. They could have talked football, explaining the benefits of Oregon's up-tempo offense, but Kelly says there wasn't time — they needed to get acquainted with a kid they barely knew.

Football is a game of intelligent compromises under constraints such as time, ability, and the raw physics of the game. And right now, at 7-1, Harbaugh's 49ers seem to have found the right mix.

To N.F.L. insiders, Cosell is a treasure trove of information. Pro football writers and broadcasters regularly hit him up privately for analysis. General managers ask for his assessment of draft prospects. Coaches are curious about his methods of breaking down film. “I got to know Greg from taking trips down to NFL Films over the last 15 or 20 years,”  Sports Illustrated’s Peter King said. “He was always sort of the wizard behind the curtain. I always respected his opinion because you could tell he watches every game. He watches all the players. And it isn’t about who has the best stats, it’s about the best players.”

When the work is going well, it can reach a level of spontaneity and unpredictability that is exhilarating — but it doesn't make the writer (not this writer anyway) pound the tabletop. It's an interior sense of satisfaction that's often so fleeting it can't be relived (or even remembered) when the writer revisits the page in a more critical mood the next day or six months later.

Ashlyn wasn't just Robert Horry's daughter. She transformed him into Big Shot Rob.

"Can Bill Simmons Win the Big One?" On @sportsguy33 and Grantland: http://nyti.ms/kXHofF (by Jonathan Mahler, new @nytmag) // via @hriefs