Lots of people here tonight, huh?

Wagner shrugs.

“This is all the time,” he replies. “We really have nothing else to do out here.”

I had called Brandon Tso, coach of the Chinle Wildcats, to ask about the best night to see a reservation game. Every night, he said. “We got no bowling alleys and no movie theaters. We just have basketball; that’s our love.”

That was good enough for me. I drove up here weeks ago to escape too much manufactured Super Bowl madness in the Valley of the Sun. The highway curled through rawboned mountains and saguaro and prickly pear cactus before climbing past limestone escarpments into the ponderosa pines and ancient red rock canyons of Navajo.

The air here, 7,000 feet above sea level, is ice-tinged.

My wife, Evelyn Intondi, and I once lived in this achingly beautiful land for six weeks, occupying a trailer in Fort Defiance. She worked as a midwife with the Indian health service, while I cared for our two young boys.

One afternoon I grabbed my basketball and set off in search of a game. Insulated by New York parochialism, I expected to find country ball, a little soft with lots of jumpers. Seven Navajo guys asked me to play; it was similar to being caught in the wrong lane with marathon runners. Up and down they went, cutting to the hoop with a juking vengeance, until this bilagaana (Navajo for white dude) had his hands on his knees.

Most years, Navajo teams go winding off the high plateau in buses and make the six-hour trek to Phoenix and the surrounding cities for the state finals. Thousands of fans follow them down.