“I was a witness”*

When you were a kid (and maybe a few years after that), when you were in the backyard (or the driveway or the gym) shooting baskets, you practiced your buzzer-beater game-winning jump shots, counting down the final seconds, the roar of the crowd whirring in your head, 10-9-8 spin move at the top of the key 7-6 you spin off a pick and head fake your opponent into Nebraska 5-4-3, your jump shot forming, peaking 2-1 SWISH BUZZER. Yeah, you were by yourself, and you might have had to shoot that dang last shot 14 times to get it just right, but you did just that if you ever owned a basketball and were near a goal.

Most of us don’t get the opportunity (and don’t deserve the opportunity) to make that shot in a real game. Very few of us get a chance to take that shot in our last home game in our last season in front of a gym of screaming fans to finish off a perfect season with the perfect jump shot. Most of us aren’t Shan (pronounced Shane) Foster. Hell, none of us come close.

Shan and his teammates played a formidable Mississippi State squad tonight featuring Nashville’s own Jamont Gordon. Vandy trailed most of the game. Foster is the best 3-point shooter ever seen in Vandy-land, but tonight his first six shots went awry, and some of us (not me, of course**) were beginning to worry. But then, sometime early in the second half, an invisible hand turned on the switch, and Mr. Foster hit NINE STRAIGHT three point shots, including the foreshadowed shot with 2.7 seconds left to win the game.

Some of those threes were from another planet, another state of consciousness. He finished with 42 points. His previous high was 33. Tonight, on senior night, he took the team on his back and took them to victory. I’ve seen a LOT of Vandy games, and I’ve never seen anything quite like we saw tonight. Seriously, some of these nine shots were from more than 30 feet away. None, not one, was uncontested. There were hands in his face and bodies doubling and tripling around him everytime he touched the ball.

Vandy won every, that is EVERY, home game this season. Foster certainly didn’t win the games by himself, but I’m here to testify that if Foster was elsewhere tonight, the Vanderbilt men would not be undefeated at home.

Foster not only brought the Vandy team home, but he brought a lot of us back to those late afternoons, when we dribbled to the key, pulled up, and hit a jump shot as true and pure as the heart of a child.

*Vandy point guard Jermaine Beal referring to Shan Foster’s beyond-incredible final home game.

**Lying through my teeth, here.