The nature of basketball is such that its most cathartic moment—when the ball goes decisively and irretrievably through the hoop—is the same every time. The ball piercing the basket is both a discrete event and a continuous waterfall of motion that, for active players, is constant throughout their careers. They shoot in practice, they shoot in the game, they shoot and shoot and shoot. The motion becomes so ingrained in their muscle memory that the gesture requires only its activation; everything else—the elevation, the aiming at the basket, the cocking of the elbow and the follow-through of the hand—is programmed.

I found myself thinking about the waterfall of shots in the wake of one of the more dramatic ones in recent N.B.A. history: Damian Lillard, of the Portland Trail Blazers, hitting the game-winning, series-ending shot against the Oklahoma City Thunder in Game Five. He shot the ball from thirty-seven feet out, with 1.7 seconds on the clock, over the outstretched arms of Paul George, one of the league’s best defenders, and it splashed through the net as the buzzer sounded.

The blocking of the play resembled a mostly empty chessboard at the endgame stage: Lillard is alone near half court while the four other Blazers and their defenders are spread out on the perimeter, far away. Lillard looks toward the teammate nearest to him on his left, Al-Farouq Aminu (the speaker of the most chillingly profound remark I have ever heard directly from an N.B.A. player: “Your body is your business”), and summons him. The conventional play here would be to set a screen so that a lesser defender has to switch over to Lillard.

But then Lillard changes his mind and waves Aminu off, not with an extravagant arm movement but with a smaller gesture, using his right hand. The first signal to Aminu is a beckoning: come here. But then, with the compact precision of an assembly-line robot, he rotates his wrist and, making the same motion but now in reverse, waves him away. As with so much that Lillard does, the whole thing happens so quickly that Aminu barely has a chance to react.

Now Lillard and George are alone near the center court. Then Lillard does the thing that has fascinated me most about his basketball style. Even more than his stellar drives to the basket where he curls into the shape of a cannonball, only to extend his arms out at the last possible moment to release the shot; even more than the remarkable efficiency of motion in his piercing, long-range jump shot; even more than his Swiss Army knife versatility—in 2014, he became the first player to participate in every single event (the skills challenge, the dunk contest, the three-point-shooting contest, the rising-stars challenge) in an All-Star game—what has most captured my imagination about Lillard is the way that he will sometimes stand very still with the ball. There is a tensile, almost vibratory quality to this momentary pause.

The shot that he took in Game Five came off the dribble, but it, too, had this quality of pressure accumulated, unseen and then seen. But not believed. Everything about the shot made you question your own eyes. This included the sight of Lillard, normally so taciturn, turning around to wave goodbye to the Oklahoma City Thunder. The sight of his wave might endure as a more iconic image than the one of the shot itself. The whole arena is on its feet in a frenzy, and Portland players are rushing toward him, but, like a surfer with the wave closing around him, he is still in his own space, and he makes that hand gesture.

Lillard is a three-time All-Star and a first-team N.B.A. point guard, and yet he has remained a stealthy figure who always seems to be hovering just outside a charmed inner circle of superstars. Part of the drama of his shot involved the way that Oklahoma City’s two stars, Paul George and Russell Westbrook, have, in particular, treated Lillard with a palpable disdain. A further ripple in the iconic-image department came in the form of a photograph taken just as Lillard extricated himself from the swarm of delirious players who had piled on top of him. The look on his face is so inscrutable and rich. There is a hint of joy, without question, and a hint of defiance, since all these celebrations, even the ones the amateurs make alone, when it’s just them and the ball and a hoop and the endless narrative loop of them taking and making shots, are stories of redemption.

Yet behind the singularity of Lillard’s shot itself was the endless waterfall of shots taken in practice, chucked up during games, the shots discussed, watched on film, dreamed of with either pleasure or horror—but mostly just shots, “getting up shots,” practicing shots, over and over, endlessly. Repetition as religion. The game continues; the shots go up and splash down like water. But for a moment, after that shot, the waterfall ceased. It was so definitive as to briefly stop basketball time.