Hoop dreams.

A red metal hoop presents a pretty clear target to a boy dribbling a ball on a driveway. The metal ring repeatedly answers his questions. No matter what goes into the attempt, a straight answer comes back, yes or no. Mostly this is a matter-of-fact yes or no, but there are variations: yes, definitely, O graced one; no, are you crazy?; hmmm, possibly, I...I...I... don't think so (or sometimes, I do think so, you lucky boy).

I used to be able to sum up my whole imaginative life in those solitary practice sessions. It wasn't that I ever saw myself devoting my entire life to basketball. Rather, playing the game, and perhaps most especially practicing by myself, gave physical expression to the whole business of becoming in my life.

Sure, I wanted to become a great ballplayer. In Indiana you are surrounded by stories of basketball heroism. I'd read about how John Wooden had won a high school game by sinking the final shot sitting down, after being knocked to the floor on a drive to the basket. I knew the story of the giant-killer high school team from Milan, Indiana long before the movie Hoosiers was made. I took pleasure in knowing that Oscar Robertson, who grew up in Indianapolis, used to wash his basketball before going out to play. I did that, too. Most of all, I identified with Rick Mount, the countryish shooting legend who led his high school team to the state title, and Purdue University all the way to the NCAA finals before losing to Lew Alcindor and the UCLA Bruins. When Rick Mount was in eighth grade people used to come by the hundreds to watch him play in a summer league. Wasn't that something?

So yes, I wanted to be a great ballplayer. But I wanted to be other things, too: a leader in politics, perhaps; the husband of a gorgeous woman; someone who was financially secure. For a Midwestern boy, I suppose my dreams could not have been more conventional, but they were many, and most importantly, they were still in the process of being formulated. It was all open and out there. The sky was full of opportunity, and in level-earth, amber-waves Indiana, you've got a lot of sky to work with.

Midday in July on an outdoor court in the Hoosier state is not a time for dreaming. It's too bright and hot and humid. Sweat runs in your eyes. Playing then is mostly about the game itself. But later, in the early evening, the light and heat diminish. The sky is inviting again and the mind goes over to speculations. The game loses its literalness. Shots become essays, conjectures. Hook shots become elegant proposals. In the assortment of physical acts, personal aspirations take on worldly shape for the first time.

These are representative acts, demonstrations of larger commitments: collecting one's breath at the free-throw line; sighting the target; visualizing the ball dropping through the hoop; following through. You remind yourself that the hoop is twice the size of the ball. It's immense. And that lovely green-eyed girl from your school - she's watching you out there somewhere. She's so beautiful. Tomorrow you will ride your bike past her house.

Many of the dreams that I first dreamed while shooting baskets in Battle Ground, Indiana, I now know I will never realize. For one thing, I never became a great ballplayer. And politics probably isn't in the cards for me either. I still like to shoot baskets, and I still daydream while doing so. But it's different now. I miss the shapeliness and directedness of the basketball dreaming of my youth. All things converged on the court in those days, with reassuring swishes, thumps, and clangs serving as the aural signals of an orderly universe. All of my dreams were able to meet in this one place. I wasn't religious in those days (maybe a little), but I do see that period as a time of grace, a time of instruction in possibilities.

Lyrical as some of those moments were, I don't long to relive the trials that accompanied my early adolescent dreaming. We seem to live our lives in stages (childhood, high school, college, etc.), and each stage has its own imaginative field and fruits thereof. Art, religion, and ambiguity were among the richest findings of my young adulthood away from the basketball court. Still, in my muscles and bones I can recall a rare unity that once was there when I had a basketball in my hands. Body, spirit, and purpose were all held together in fine clarity.

That sense of completeness - or at least the possibility of completeness - has been replaced by an odd joy of dispersal, in which I now take pleasure and discomfort in not having all options before me, and often not knowing at all what the best option is. I guess this is what we call getting older and wiser. Sometimes it's hard, though, not to give in to the sentimentality of longing for a time when a jump shot and a swish meant everything.

Timothy P. Schilling lives in Seattle, Washington.