Watch and learn, Debbie always ordered, sapphire eyes boring into Lindsay as she slammed the side of her right hand into the palm of her left. Watch and fucking learn, she always snapped when Lindsay's attention started to wander. The lessons were always for Lindsay. Lindsay was the anointed one. Jenn was just along for the ride.

Debbie was a lightning storm, quick and sharp and everywhere at once. Lindsay is a volcano, silent and safe until she suddenly sends the rock in all directions with her rage. Jenn is Jenn; that's all a second- or third-stringer needs to be, which is good, because Jenn doesn't know what she is yet other than Jenn.

Watch and learn, Debbie always said, pointing at other teams, because lessons are sometimes best learned from the enemy. It's all about the one and the five; the rest are interchangable, but you got to have the one- and she pounded a fist into her chest like some ancient warrior, and the five, and she hooked a thumb back towards Taj, because Taj was always around for lessons like these. Who saved the title last year for the Shock? Powell and Riley, the one and the five. Who made the bonehead plays and didn't make the stops? Teasley and Leslie, the one and the five. How are they building the Storm? Around Bird and Jackson, the one and the five. What put Phoenix and Washington in the lottery? No one, no five.

But it wasn't just about basketball, as Debbie told them when Lindsay made a point of some kind. Who's always been the face of New York? Who's the face of Charlotte? Seattle? You represent your team, and don't you ever forget that. You take all the blame, but you damn well better not take the credit. She taught them that a point guard embodied her team because she shaped it.

You are your home, Debbie warned them, and she knew better than any of them, because she was Philly toughness and Minnesota stubbornness and Aussie good humor and three kinds of pride jammed into one little package. Jenn remembers understanding that in Wendy, hearing down-home Carolina in her voice, seeing how the mountains and the coast shaped her. She sees it now in Taj's heart, big as all Texas; in Katie and in Brooke, tall and blonde and sweet as Midwestern corn; in the way Margo expects everything to go wrong; in Lindsay's frozen smiles and sudden thaws; in herself, detached and cynical, belonging but maybe not belonging and maybe not wanting to belong, the eternal complaint of Staten Island.

And it's funny, but Lindsay still hasn't learned that. She still expects Asjha and Laura to get jokes that only a Minnesotan would. She doesn't understand the great soda versus pop controversy that breaks out when any combination of them go out for fast food. She doesn't know why Laura whoops with laughter and nudges Brooke significantly whenever someone talks about rooting for the team. Lindsay can thread the needle, find Taj in a double-team, go over the top to Margo, and find Nykesha blind, but as good as her vision is, she can't see the world through other people's eyes.

Watch and learn. Chemistry is everything. Maybe it's an explosive reaction, maybe it's a perfect mix, but there's always something on the burner. Debbie would roll game tape taken from the Miami archives, spliced together to show almost no basketball. She revealed the effects of love and hate on a basketball team, told them in no uncertain terms what happened when personal likes and disdain leaked onto the court, drew the line between dynamic tension and locker room poison. She was as clinical about sex as the teacher Jenn remembered from her sophomore year of high school; if it needed to be done, it needed to be done. Lindsay had gasped and Jenn had blushed. Lindsay still gasps. Jenn doesn't blush.

Watch and learn, and Jenn has to bite back her laughter when Lindsay says that to Jamie, because it's too soon, even in the abbreviated time scale that every New Yorker's heart beats double-time to. Debbie always said it impatiently, intensely, personally, seriously; Lindsay says it cockily, with a knowing smile. Jenn thinks that only if you say it Debbie's way do you have the right to say it at all, and that's why she doesn't say it.

Jenn has watched and learned, and she knows that Taj likes the ball deeper in the post than Margo, but you can do a lob pass to Margo that no one in the world can catch; that Katie should get the ball the second she gets to the corner; that Asjha is more comofrtable out of the pain than she should be; that if Nykesha is hot she should get the ball as soon as she crosses halfcourt, but if she's not then don't pass it to her and don't listen to her when she screams for it. She knows that she's not canny enough to get the pass where it needs to be; she may have as much, if not more, foot speed as Lindsay, but she doesn't have the court vision. That's why Lindsay was a top-five pick and Jenn was an undrafted free agent. It takes a career day for her to have what Lindsay would call a bad game.

But she sees more than Lindsay off the court: the hunger in Jamie's eyes when Lindsay's back is turned, the way Katie smiles at Brooke and the way she smiles at Vassilis and how they're not the same, the hatred that twists Nykesha's face whenever they play Sheri Sam and the Sting, a different bit of tension crackling with every matchup they play.

Lindsay likes to pretend these things don't exist. It's not hatred or fear, it's just oblivion. Or maybe it's denial. Denial's been everyone's friend at some point, as Jenn and several shots of tequila and vodka know. But she's pretty sure that it's oblivion. If Lindsay were in denial instead of oblivion, she wouldn't take Janel McCarville out to dinner at the steakhouse, because she wouldn't want people thinking she might be gay. She just ignores the possibility because these things don't exist.

This is one of those things that Jenn has figured out from watching and applying the lessons learned from Debbie, the ones that weren't really for her in the first place. If she takes nothing else away from this experience, she knows that basketball may be basketball, but a basketball team is so much more than basketball.