I will never experience the joys of dunking a basketball in my life.
Sure, I dunked all over my modified Nerf rim (so it would not break) growing up. My friend lowered his goal to eight feet (later to eight and half to make us feel more manly) during our pickup games so that we could dunk all over each other.
None of that is quite the same as being able to pick up any regulation basketball and go run and dunk, cleanly mind you, a basketball through any regulation height rim.
I just turned 28 and I quit my athletic pursuits early on in college. I like to think I can run and jump the same as I remember or better. Years of inactivity and weight gain have me convinced that even though most professional athletes’ primes are in their late 20s, my athletic prime has passed me by. I do not want to test it because it will probably just confirm it.
My height is 5 foot 10 inches and my last measured vertical in high school was around 24 inches. The closest I could get was the middle of the net. I was never close at all, which I think is a good thing.
My friend Andrew is slightly taller and more athletic than me. He was always so tantalizingly close to dunking it drove him mad. He could grab the rim, but just could not get high enough to get a regulation basketball through. Dunking a small toddler’s ball gave him hope he could will the extra inches he needed out of himself if he kept trying, but I witnessed him try and fail for several hours at different points of his life.
Junior high is when you first start hearing about other kids your age dunking. Even if you did not go to school with a kid who could dunk, you always heard about a kid at another school who could.
If someone at your school could, it would usually take a lot of convincing to get them to even start attempting in front of everyone to confirm their dunking prowess.
By high school, the mystique kind of goes away in some communities as players grow tall enough it becomes more embarrassing they cannot dunk if they are a certain height, than the fact they can.
Some players might dunk every time through the layup line, but if they never get that perfect breakaway scenario with no one contesting them and the score perfectly out of reach to risk it, then they never do it.
Still, this is closer than I will ever get so I asked some current players on the Bowie High School basketball team to explain the feeling.

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