The sparrows fled the courtyard. It was quiet amid the classics. John Szabo stepped out of the elevator and walked through the sunlit atrium of the Central Library. He passed a slumbering homeless man and, with the efficiency of a spy, disappeared into stacks of bound archives, hundreds of thousands of relevant and obscure pages -- including the 1991 "Journal of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan." A tall man with sparks of gray in his goatee, Szabo, the city librarian, oversees 72 branches, a $241.8 million budget, 17,000 restaurant menus, 64 ukuleles, a Shakespeare volume from 1685, and lockers of puppets for a children's theater. He stopped at a shelf holding years of "Family Handyman" magazines. Founded in 1951 for those who grout tile and hang cabinets, the periodical was no match for Prince Harry's memoir or a Stephen King novel.

The nature of basketball is such that its most cathartic moment--when the ball goes decisively and irretrievably through the hoop--is the same every time. The ball piercing the basket is both a discrete event and a continuous waterfall of motion that, for active players, is constant throughout their careers. They shoot in practice, they shoot in the game, they shoot and shoot and shoot. The motion becomes so ingrained in their muscle memory that the gesture requires only its activation; everything else--the elevation, the aiming at the basket, the cocking of the elbow and the follow-through of the hand--is programmed. I found myself thinking about the waterfall of shots in the wake of one of the more dramatic ones in recent N.B.A. history: Damian Lillard, of the Portland Trail Blazers, hitting the game-winning, series-ending shot against the Oklahoma City Thunder in Game Five.