If I had to sum up my childhood with a single image, it would be the poster of Moses Malone that was taped to the wall next to my parents’ bed, in the master bedroom of our suburban Houston home. In the poster, a mustached and decidedly sober-looking Malone, a Hall of Fame center for the Rockets from 1976 to 1982, parts a Red Sea of basketballs with a shepherd’s crook. At the bottom, it said, simply, “Moses.”

Malone was there because my mother, who had multiple sclerosis, was not. For most people, M.S. takes its toll over many years and is punctuated by long remissions. For my mother, the disease wasn’t so forgiving. Her limbs stopped working first, but by the time I had turned five, in 1980, her mind had succumbed as well. When a neurologist told my father that she would never recover, he decided that he could no longer care for her at home.

I’m told that my mom was a funny and idiosyncratic woman before she got sick, and yet I’m confident that, had she been healthy and still living in our house, she would not have wanted my father to tape a basketball poster next to their bed. She also probably wouldn’t have wanted my father to do a lot of other things he did during those years, such as replace all the furniture in the dining room with a black inner tube that my sister and I used as a trampoline, or throw a party where guests were instructed to come dressed as Cyndi Lauper.

But my mother wasn’t there, and so the dining-room furniture went out and the Moses Malone poster went up. At night, when I couldn’t sleep, I would crawl into the empty side of my father’s king-sized bed and stare at Malone until I fell asleep. After my mother became sick, we also stopped going to synagogue on Saturday mornings. My father was in no mood to praise God while his wife deteriorated before his eyes. Instead, we worshipped at the Summit, the arena where the Rockets played at the time.

My father, Max Apple, is a writer, and, in the early eighties he published an article about the Houston point guard Calvin Murphy. A Rockets media executive took notice and offered my father a press pass for the 1984-85 and 1985-86 seasons. Whenever the Rockets played at home on a weekend, the two of us would sit together in Section 114, our view partially blocked by the backboard but clear enough that we could make out the otherworldly displays of athleticism put on each game by Akeem Olajuwon. (This was before he became a devout Muslim and added an “h” to the start of his name.) For road games, we curled up together on a dilapidated pale-green couch. My father would lie down and sometimes doze off, a habit that seemed inexplicable to me at the age of eight. If the game was a blowout I might let him sleep. If it was close, I would nudge him awake and crawl onto his stomach, a ritual I called “getting into position,” which was thought to bring good luck to the Rockets.

Thirty years ago, shortly before the start of the 1985-1986 season, my father published an essay about the team and its importance to us in the New York Times Magazine. It begins with scenes from my father’s childhood in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he and his father rooted for the minor-league hockey team (also called the Rockets), then moves into an account of raising me as a Houston Rockets fan.

I reread the essay recently, and I was struck by its melancholy tone. My father is a very funny writer, a satirist who can’t help but be tickled by the objects of his satire. But there is not a single comic line in his essay about the role basketball played in our lives. Here is how my father describes my after-school habit of playing basketball alone in our driveway:

Sam puts down his school bag, drinks a glass of milk and goes outside until long after dark. He is hungry, tired, wet and alone; he is repeating for the thousandth time the same movement. He has little sense of life’s complexity, of the adult emotions that will soon shake him even more than the Rockets’ losses.

In my memory, it’s all joy: the Rockets, the inner tube in our dining room, the crazy parties. After the devastating loss of my mother, my father had healed me with regular doses of basketball and absurd humor. Somehow, in all these years, it hadn’t occurred to me that the remedy hadn’t worked quite as well on his own grief.

In 1986, my father won a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the next year we moved from Houston to New York. The plan had been to stay for six months, but we ended up staying for two and a half years. I spent almost every day of that time arguing with my new friends over what was then still a legitimate question: Olajuwon or Ewing? In a sea of twelve-year-old Knicks fans, my attachment to the Rockets became my defining characteristic—a characteristic that was made all the more definitive by the shiny, and in retrospect ridiculously puffy, red Rockets jacket I wore every winter day.

When we returned to Houston, in 1989, things were different. My mother, who had been in a near vegetative state for some time, died that year, the day after my fourteenth birthday. By then, my father had a new wife, and I had all the adult emotions that my father had anticipated in his essay. My anxiety morphed into obsessive-compulsive disorder, and I began to mumble small prayers under my breath, including pleas for the happiness of my mother in the afterworld. My father and I were still devoted to the Rockets, but we no longer went to games.

The summer between my junior and senior years of high school was particularly hard. I was still struggling with my O.C.D., and when my high-school girlfriend became suicidal I was convinced that it was my fault. I began to see a therapist who tried to help me understand that I was in a destructive relationship. It seemed to help. By the end of my senior year, things were getting better. I started dating someone else. The Rockets had made the playoffs that year, and my father decided to buy tickets. He said that they were my high-school-graduation present, but I knew he wanted to go to the games as much as I did.