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When we had been dating only a couple of months, my husband gave me a basketball for my birthday, thus making certain that he was the man I would marry.

Writing Boost has been great excuse to re-discover the game. I bought a new net for the hoop on the backboard, inflated the basketball, took some shots, adjusted my aim for the arthritis in my shoulder, shot some more. Couldn't stop, because that's the nature of this compulsion, as any young or wish-I-were-still-young person can tell you.

It doesn't matter if you're male or female, fourteen or forty, professional or playground-you only have to bounce the ball once to want to keep the pam pam pam coming. 

Each sport has its compelling sounds. There's something about bounce of a basketball on a driveway at a picnic that draws players like bees to flowers. And consider the pat of pigskin that pulls the oldsters away from the Thanksgiving feast and out to the back yard to risk life and limb for one last taste of glory. Tennis players have the bomp of the serve, football players have the oomph of bodies colliding, swimmers have the whamph of the underwater exhale, and cyclists have the whir of the peloton.

When I coached softball, I would play a few rounds of catch with each player. Theoretically I was checking the snap as they threw and glove work as they received the ball. Honestly-it wasn't enough to hear the slap of the ball in leather as the girls warmed up. I needed to feel it in my glove.

I still want to play catch.  Because not just catch, just as it's not just a dribble, not just a spiral, not just a spike. It's a compulsion that makes the youthful heart of the athlete of any age beat harder-and better.

I have three surgically-repaired fingers in my glove hand. My orthopedist would not understand why I would risk delicate reconstruction simply to feel that slap. There is an end to everything and, if I could beat down that compulsion, I would put away my glove. I'm already thinking of buying a new glove, something I can wear on my throwing hand so no one (likely my husband) can say, "Are you crazy? You can't handle hard throws anymore."

A reasonable person would say, "Yes. You're right. Time to grow up."

But then someone will bounce a ball. Or slap some leather. Or grunt with joyful exertion. I can't grow up, can't beat down this compulsion. Not with the basketball sitting out on a snow pile under the hoop. Can't do it.

That swish is just one more toss away. I just know it.

Kathy Mackel, Boost, Dial, Penguin Books