Trying to teach the machine what basketball is becomes a recursive impossibility, because every dribble carries more variables than the system can quantify and every jump resolves into data only after the magic has evaporated. I tell the computer that the sport is a mixture of torque, timing, rhythm, intention, and childhood mythology, and it answers with vectors and velocity tables that fail to understand why my heart accelerated the first time I saw MJ retire when I was only eight. I tell it that I became a fan of a duo in Orlando not because their statistics aligned but because their movements felt like the closest thing to flight I had ever seen. I tell it that I dreamed of playing basketball all the time, rehearsing crossovers in the air before sleeping, mapping imaginary courts in my room, but the machine keeps asking for coordinates, trajectories, quantifiable mechanics. I try to explain that the dream is the part it cannot compute, that the court becomes a place where data and desire collide, and that the beauty of the game lives precisely within what cannot be reduced to instructions.
Canek Zapata
