How Can You Not Be Romantic About Women’s Basketball?

Most "women’s sports novels" are really novels about girls. In them, girlhood is something mourned before it's over. Like the games themselves, the books are set to ticking clocks. When the high school field hockey players of Quan Barry's We Ride Upon Sticks grill their teammate Kendra about losing her virginity, their inquest feels less nosy than urgent. "Time was running out, adultdom just around the corner," the novel's collective narrator says. "One by one, sex was coming for us, sex and death and taxes. We wanted to make sure it didn’t catch us unaware."

These novels see sports as an open field or training ground, a means by which girls can work out angst and desire—or even just retreat from them. In Marisa Crane's A Sharp Endless Need , published this past May, a high school basketball star is consumed by longing for a teammate. The game offers Mack "a place that existed outside of human curses." Gopi, the 11-year-old narrator of Chetna Maroo's Western Lane , picks up squash while she grieves her dead mother. Her age belies her skill at observation; Gopi is attuned to more than her father and sisters would guess. Squash grants her peace from this heaviness. On the court, "no one was rushing me, and if I wanted to, I could think."

They aren't so dissimilar, the patterns of sports and girlhood. What is teenage life but assigning too much importance to random and quickly forgotten events? "We wanted legacy … our names in bright lights, our names in everyone's mouths," A Sharp Endless Need begins, in a breathless prologue. Mack's feelings are cooled by the epilogue, her hoop dreams unrealized: "Now, though, we also want wisdom, we want quietude, we want the sweet decadence of boredom."