Prologue

Max, 1993-1994

Everyone knew the Harrison Warriors were going to win that game.

They knew it. The Cortlandt Cavaliers knew it. The kids lined up begging for sold-out tickets to the boys state basketball championship at the Hershey Arena sure knew it, judging by the number of Harrison-green jerseys clothing the masses. TheHershey Patriot-News knew it, and blared its prediction from the newspaper boxes greeting the Cortlandt High School band bus as it splashed through an Exxon parking lot. “March Massacre in the Making,” said the headline. No one could stop Harrison’s Brock Brown. Coached by his father, who’d once played in the NBA, he was Pennsylvania’s MVP and set to enroll at Penn State, delighting the commonwealth’s sports pundits. The Cortlandt Cavs, on the other hand, had squeaked through the semifinals past an unusually error-prone Pittsburgh squad. The Cavs had no players like Brock, just a pair of 6’6” twin guards, James and Mickey O’Riley, and three other solid players to round out the starting line-up. Even though they’d landed in the championship game, the state coaches’ poll still ranked them 17th.

As if to magnify the gloom, the gray March clouds dumped so many buckets of rain onto I-81 as the caravan from Cortlandt headed southwest that the band bus’s windshield wipers couldn’t keep up. Maxine Wozniak, star reporter for the high school newspaper, star trumpet player, and star student, whose brash braininess endeared her to her classmates about as much as you’d imagine, sat in her assigned seat next to the silent mascot Moe Cox. Everyone in Cortlandt was obsessed with basketball, particularly with the boys headed to the championship, but Moe wore his Cavalier costume daily, whether there was a game or not. No one had seen the cartwheeling giant without the headpiece since he showed up as a mute transfer student three years before. For all her inquisitive nature, Max had no idea why Moe didn’t s