i may be a bird in a cage but at least it's your cage

i usually cut my basketball talk. i'm not going to, tonight, and you can scroll past or unfriend me if it bothers you. tomorrow i'll be back to cutting things. tonight, no.

let me tell you about my lucky sweatshirt.

once upon a time, it was carolina blue. the true blue of an april sky. now, it's sort of a non-descript grayish-white, and the cuffs are shredded. i watch carolina games with my thumbs crammed through the cuffs. i ripped the left cuff out with my teeth during the michigan state semifinal last year. once, this sweatshirt was my father's. then it was shrunk in the wash, and it was my mother's, and later it was mine. it says "carolina" on the front, all caps, and you know which carolina i mean. there's a stain underneath the "O", a brown smudge that represents the chocolate ice cream i dropped there during halftime of the 1993 title game. this sweatshirt saw carolina win the jordan title, in 1982. it saw them win the chris webber title, in 1993. i loaned it out to maryland in 2002, for their title, in the year in carolina's history of Which We Do Not Speak. there's a long stain of scotch on the front from that title; miss alice and i were drinking scotch from plastic cups in the main lounge of our dorm and rooting for juan dixon and her ugly boyfriend steve blake, and i was so drunk i spilled scotch all over my sweatshirt.

and my lucky sweatshirt saw the 8-20 title, the 2005 title, the roy title, the title that's meant more than anything in my history of being a carolina fan.

it's threadbare. liek, literally threadbare. it's worn so thin around the lettering that you can actually see through it. the letters are cracking and peeling. i could buy a new sweatshirt; i could start a new legacy. it isn't impossible. what are rituals but repeating the same mistakes over and over again, after all? i could stop that, i could create something new. a couple of weeks ago, before the miami game, a guy on the bus told me that i was wearing "seriously, the most fucking wretched carolina sweatshirt" he'd ever seen. he didn't even know the little red apartment; he used wretched unironically and he meant what he said. *shrug* after all, he was right - it's a pretty wretch sweatshirt.

but it's got history, and it's got luck behind it. i wash it after every loss. between wins, i don't bother. i only washed it four times last year, and i didn't wash it in the off-season, after the title. i packed it, sweat-soaked and disgusting, and moved it all the way to north carolina like that, because it's what i do.

i have talked before about how i define myself. first i am a woman; secondly i am a writer; and third, before i am anything else, i am a carolina fan. i have been a carolina fan as long as i have known there was carolina basketball to be a fan of.

there are actually people at carolina who gape at the fans, who don't understand what it means to have your entire identity tied up in a basketball team. there are those of you here who stare at me strangely, too, i know - you don't understand, it's just a game. but it's never just a game in the great state of north carolina. it's life or death, it's who you are, whether you're duke or state or wake or right.

my lucky sweatshirt doesn't have a single piece of elastic left in it. the hem is stretched to pieces. the neckline gapes. the cuffs are shredded. but when i put that sweatshirt on, i know who i am. i know my scars and my history and where i've been and where i'm going. when i wear it, i'm home, i'm one meaningless person in a nation that bleeds the color of the april sky, and i am exactly the sum of my parts.

i am never more myself than when i wear that sweatshirt, and if you can't understand what i mean, then i am genuinely sorry for you. and i can't explain it, but it means more to me than i could ever have words for. if there is one thing in my life i couldn't write about - it's this.