The moments that made sports important to us.

100° heat can’t delay a neighborhood baseball game, but mom’s dinner call can. It begins. Turning your kitchen into the Boston Garden by suction-cupping a Nerf hoop to the fridge. Getting picked sooner than you thought. Staying up late on a school night because your team is on Monday Night Football. “Make it, take it.” Being on the floor when your team wins a game at the buzzer; being on the bottom of the pile because you made the shot. Count to ten before you can blitz — “One Mississippi. Two Mississippi.” Game night. Pizza and beer. Ceremoniously laying out your uniform the night before. Catching your first foul ball. Your dad has H-O-R-S and you’ve still got your best shot in your back pocket.

We have a tenuous relationship with the games we love. There’s an absurdity in the simplicity of it all — a player, a tool, an objective, the turn. But somewhere along the line, absurdity gave way to escape, where we found things inside us like sacrifice, dedication, and achievement. Whether we participated, spectated or organized, at a certain point, it gets fuzzy because we just want to be around it — it keeps drawing us back in.

Because the next moment might be the moment we experience something bigger than ourselves. Call it greatness, call it nostalgia, call it what you will — it’s all for the love of the game.

—Ryan Sims and Nick Hall of Chitwood & Hobbs