By Aseel Barghuthi

"But you had a dream ..."
"Yeah, well it's gone now, and we both know I wasn't good enough."
"You were good enough."
- in a conversation with a friend -

I don't know when I lost it. It just disappeared after the first semester of college. I knew it was still within me somewhere, I knew that I hadn't lost if forever, but I knew that it was lost ... for a while at least.

I just wanted to rewind through high school and take a good look at just what the word "basketball" meant to me back then. And this Christmas break, back home in Amman, Jordan, I did.

Staring at my poster-less walls in my formerly basketball-crazed room, I couldn't sleep. So I walked downstairs to our TV room, sorted through the various videotapes that were laying on the shelves, and there I found it: a tape of my final basketball game at the Amman Baccalaureate School. I felt a sharp pang in my stomach as I shoved the tape in, and stared angrily at the person I used to be.

As I watched myself drain three after three, give assist after assist, my eyes began to fill with tears. Where had I gone? What had happened? How could I have lost it? By the end of the tape the cushion I had been resting my head on was soaked.

Hearing about my old teams' basketball stories made me feel even worse. I was often confronted with the question: "So, you're playing basketball at Duke right?" I would force a meager smile and shake my head, changing the subject immediately.

Making it to the final cuts of the Duke Junior Varsity basketball felt like a great accomplishment. But not making it to the actual team knocked the breath out of me for the longest time. Not being acknowledged as the great player I liked to think of myself as completely disheartened me in every way. Ever since then I haven't been able to talk about basketball. The friends that knew me as the basketball-crazed chick and often teased me for it, were surprised to find that everything I was doing at Duke did not involve my former passion whatsoever.

So I haven't been talking about basketball at all‹until today. I signed up for a basketball half credit course, in an attempt to reaffirm my skills, and possibly increase my chances of making the team next year. I know that walking onto the basketball court and holding the basketball between my fingers will definitely reignite my passion for the game, but I know that it's going to take a lot more than passion to regain my long lost abilities.

When looking through pictures of me at basketball games, I feel extremely apologetic. Apologetic towards my former coach, my former teammates, and all those who had faith in me. I had a dream. For all I know, I still have that dream. I just have to dig down deep inside and pull it out.

It's there, I can feel it. A couple more Cameron-crazed Duke games, a couple more pick-up games at the gym, a couple more basketball articles for GBALLMAG.COM, and it'll be back. I'm sure of it.

Until next time....

#68, Aseel

Aseel Barghuthi is a graduate of the Amman Baccalaureate School in Amman, Jordan, and a freshman at Duke University. She played high school ball in Amman and Athens, Ga. To contact Aseel with any comments or suggestions, e-mail her at aab14@duke.edu.