Eating the Sun
the joy of Stewie & the unfamiliar sight of a system
Liberty 106 - Sun 75
Watching last night’s home opener at Barclays was a joy, but that’s not saying much. What with Ellie doing Whitney Houston, the Timeless Torches doing themselves, and the team devouring the Sun en route to a 30-point victory, you’d have had to be in a coma — or, like the person sitting ahead of me, in a selfie-editing fugue — not to be enjoying yourself.
But then I rewatched the game this afternoon, and even on my crusty laptop, with the rain tapping on the window and my dog whining for an advance on her dinner, the joy didn’t dissipate. This was a true and deep delight of a game. Who knows what slumps and sulks and injuries lie ahead of us but, as John Lennon would have said if he were a Liberty fan: life is what happens when you’re waiting for your starters to return. So let’s get to it.
Stewie (31 points, 10 rebounds) looked terrifying. She missed all four of her 3’s — maybe we shouldn’t celebrate the return of that particular weapon just yet — but in almost every other way she played as if she’d recently imbibed an invincibility star. At one point in the third quarter Aneesah Morrow tripped her, sending her to the floor hard. She stood up, laughed, called for the ball, and on the next play isolated Morrow near the basket and scored easily over her, following it up with the most microscopic of stare-downs. That’s the kind of petty, plausibly deniable punitiveness I love.
Julie Vanloo, a hardship player who still had airline cookie wrappers in her pockets from her red eye flight, damn near had a triple double. I’m not ready to say we should sign her (anybody remember Stephanie Talbot’s near-triple-double against the Sparks?) but I was delighted to see us operating enough like a machine that we could swap in a Home-Depot-bin cog and put it to good use.
Johannes was so quintessentially herself that I imagine she celebrated with a Gauloise. Of her five (!) 3’s, my favorite came in the third quarter. The Sun — who, to be fair, were being humiliated — had started playing dirty, and the refs had decided that they too ought to sully us up a little. Things were getting about as dire as they can when you’re still up twenty points, and then Johannes sank a transition 3, sending the crowd into one of their periodic earplug-necessitating frenzies. Mini-run squelched.
Meanwhile, on the other end of the conscientiousness spectrum, Pauline Astier — who by most measures had a quietly impressive first game — spent much of the night fed up with herself for a variety of microscopic infractions. In the second quarter she missed a pair of free throws, and then as soon as Ellie’s crew was off the court at halftime, Astier was out on the court, alone, shooting free throws like Dobby the House Elf banging his head on a dresser. I have a feeling she’s going to be her own most merciless coach, to the Liberty’s benefit. I hope there’s a French edition of Self-Compassion.
Laney (12 points, one Sun-broken-ankle-added-to-her-mantle-piece) took some powerful, knee-brace-free steps back toward becoming herself. And she only made the crowd fall into a silent stricken terror that she had re-injured herself once.
It was, all things considered, about as auspicious a debut as Chris DeMarco could have hoped for. He set aside his customary black athleisure in favor of a sharp blue suit (I imagine Clara Wu Tsai sending her stylist on an emergency mission). He had the Libs cutting on offense and switching on defense and spraying him with congratulatory beverages in the locker room.
See you tomorrow in Washington.