Odd that, when you think about it, all the strategizing and scouting and coaching, all the countless hours of shooting alone in your driveway, of dribbling drills, of the three-man weave, of lifting weights, of doing wind sprints until you hurl, all those years in stale gyms on entry level - Biddy basketball, CYO travel all-stars, AAU tournaments, high school, you get the point - all of that boils down to the simple physics of a rudimentary orange sphere back-spinning toward a metallic cylinder at this exact moment.
-- Win as the Narrator (chapter 1)

Importance: This quote appears at the beginning of the narrative when Win is watching the deciding shot of the NCAA basketball championship game. It establishes the comparison of life to a championship basketball game that runs throughout the narrative. Various characters do a lot of work to control their destiny only to have one incident undermine it. For example, the living members of...