It’s a buzzer beater!

NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament fans watched in amazement over the weekend when Gonzaga University freshmen Galen Suggs took the ball with less than three seconds left in the game, dribbled just over half court and flung up a shot that hit the backboard and went in, winning the game and sending the Bulldogs to the National Championship game. 

With the win in hand, Suggs and his teammates went crazy. The buzzer beater kept their perfect 31-0 miracle season alive. We train for buzzer beaters, but life tends to bring more mundane challenges. We get up go to school or work, mix in dinner and maybe a few other challenges and then go to bed and repeat it all over again. But we still face our fair share of game winning shots, last minute field goals, or walk off runs to steal a phrase from a few other sports.

Here’s a few:

–A last minute paper. You rush home from work, peck your wife and kids on the cheek, skip dinner, and instead scurry to the computer to finish a 20-page paper for that night class you’re taking. You write something, take a step back to erase it, and then start up again, all the while, regularly checking on the clock to make sure you finish in time to push the send button before the professor’s deadline to hand in the paper. In fact, when you finally do send the paper, you make a good show by dramatically going out of your way in hitting the return key on the keyboard.

–Showing up in the nick of time. In the age of Covid, you wake up, upset that you’ve overslept, quickly clean up your office from the mess you created the day before and start logging into the computer. Unfortunately, you hit a day when the technology doesn’t want to seem to play nice. You click the restart button, worried that you’re going to be late. The computer takes its good old time, but fortunately you log into the big meeting just as your boss starts to kick things off. You mute your microphone and let out a huge sigh.

–Landing the big fish. The phone rings, you’re on a call so you let it go to voicemail. You forget all about the message until later when you finally listen to learn that you’ve landed the big client. You’re by yourself but you still jump in the air to celebrate.

We don’t get the chance to bask in the glory like Suggs did, jumping on a scorers table to bask in the celebration, but we still have our buzzer beaters all the same.