On Saturday afternoon, I watched Isaiah Roby and his teammates take on something else.

No, they weren’t merely fighting the ghost of Sir Isaac Newton and his laws on gravitation. No, they weren’t simply taking on another opponent in a high-stakes game in their drive towards winning enough games to get into the NCAA Tournament.

On this day, on this court, at this school, in this year? They were there to take on something much bigger.

(via Omaha.com)

While Roby floated up towards the rim, seemingly heading towards the roof above my head in section 312, the very real and leaden reality of what was happening at the University of Nebraska — and all over our country in the ongoing, stomach-churning tilt on the whirl of racism in the United States of America — was waiting for him when his sneakers hit the ground again.

You see, videos had recently surfaced of a student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln spewing digital bile and vomiting out the kind of white supremacist stomach acid that makes your nose sting with its moral repugnance. In these videos, he had reveled in his hate; gleefully and sickeningly smearing this flaccid white man’s outrage all over himself, professing to love violence and laying claim to the dubious title of “Most active white nationalist in the state of Nebraska”.

If you know about Nebraska, then surely you’re familiar: our sports mean just a little more to us than they probably should. We care too much. And give too little of a damn about how that perception of us outside the state border. These boys who would be king that suit up for us in sports are revered above almost all else.

Our basketball team could have coasted. They could have plead the 5th in a predominantly white town in a predominantly white state, their coach could have “stuck to sports” and there would be few who would have blamed them.

(via Omaha.com)

But they didn’t.

They could have reacted with justifiable rage and the kind of righteous anger that I can’t ever truly know because of the color of my skin and the pigmentation of theirs.

But they didn’t.

You see, this team and these young men showed themselves to be possessed of a certain and particular kind of mettle. They gathered themselves, wrapped their jackets around themselves when the blustery north wind of hate tried to blow them off course and they kept coming.

They showed themselves to have the kind of synaptic ammunition that not all humans load into the chamber when they see wrong in the world.

They also found themselves with the kind of pulpit that not many 20-year-olds have the opportunity to speak from; a 1.8 million person bullhorn that echoes from the banks of the Missouri river to the Sandhills out in the Panhandle plains of this state

They used it.

If this seems small to you, remember: this isn’t something they needed to do. They wanted to do this. They’re unpaid, young, and have more than enough on their plates going to school and dealing with school and navigating the sometimes treacherous path of pre-adulthood. But they chose to do it anyway.

What Roby did that afternoon? That was a lightning bolt. Flashy and bold and wild and incredibly easy to see and think about. We could harness the raw athleticism of his dunk and use it to fire the home fans up.

What he and his teammates did off the court? The shirts that they wore and the message that they didn’t just espouse, but believed in?

That’s electricity.

That’s harnessing the power that’s inherent in the moment and using it. They could have committed arson, but instead they chose to create a combustion engine.

During a frigid February week, when Nebraskans had to stand face to face with themselves in the mirror and search for the truth in their eyes and their hearts and minds: these boys were men and did something I will never forget.

I have never been so proud to care a little too much about my basketball team.