When I was sixteen, I watched a video that changed my life.

It’s a six-minute video of eight Philadelphia 76ers from the 2017-18 season – Timothé Luwawu-Cabarrot, Robert Covington, Justin Anderson, Markelle Fultz, Joel Embiid, Ben Simmons, Dario Saric, JJ Redick, Nik Stauskas, and TJ McConnell – telling each other cringe-worthy jokes across a tiny table and trying not to laugh. And, yes, I did list the Sixers in order of appearance in the video from memory, thank you very much.

I call it the Sacred Text. To this day, I return to this video every few months, when I remember its existence and need a quick smile. I can watch it over and over and not get bored – from Timothé’s deadpan delivery of “because he was a fungi” to JJ barking at Dario like a dog to Justin and Markelle bickering about who gets to tell their joke first, there’s always a new three-second micro-clip to become obsessed with. It’s fanservice. It’s cinema. It’s a warmth I have yet to capture again since I first saw the video in my sophomore year of high school. Not a single basketball team – not even the Fellas-era Suns, with all-smiles Mikal Bridges and Victorian-child-reincarnate Cam Johnson, could do the trick. I am so serious. You might not get it, but to me, this video is truly the Sacred Text.

I listened to The Confetti Game live on the radio in my dad’s car shortly after finding the Sacred Text. There’s a video buried deep in my Snapchat memories of me slowly zooming in on the dashboard interface, captioned “SIXERS I LOVE YOU BUT YOU’RE STRESSING ME OUT.” I still think of spring and summer 2018 as idyllic — it would be hard to explain unless you, too, Reader, have been sixteen and restless and scared. I was restless and scared that summer, begging the Sixers not to trade any of my favorite players away, both over the internet and through some imagined prayer or manifestation. I knew it was coming, and I dreaded it, but at that point, I had never known the heartache of all of your favorite players being in different places across the country, never to play together or make gimmicky fanservice videos together ever again.

A music writer back then, I actually wrote about this sensation of NBA fandom being sparkly and new to me and trades being heartbreaking in a piece I never finished, titled What’s the difference between Julian Casablancas and Joel Embiid, anyway?:

It’s kind of funny, actually. There are so many differences between the fanbases behind 2000s indie rock bands and the National Basketball Association that you don’t even realize. When I call the Strokes my best boys, it’s normal, but I only get weird looks and questions of if I even watch basketball when I do the same with the Sixers. I spent years of my life writing fanfiction and drawing fanart for various bands, but it’s incredibly hard to find people doing the same for basketball players, not that I’ve looked for any. Also, the most obvious point of all of this: basketball teams don’t make albums. I know, it seems obvious, but at some point a part of me realized that all these guys will ever do is play games on national television.

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Coming from a place where lineups rarely change and seeing your favorite celebrity is a rare occurrence, it surprised me when I went to a Sixers game last year and didn’t find anyone else nerding out the way I did. I quickly found out that you didn’t even have to watch the game if you didn’t want to. Unlike basically every other performance event, it was completely fine to check your Instagram feed or play a round of Candy Crush mid-game. The trades and lineup changes sometimes shook me to the core at first as well. I cried as much when Dario Saric was traded to the Timberwolves as I did when Nick McCarthy left Franz Ferdinand. In a way, trades are just like the rhythm guitarist of your favorite band being replaced. For most people, they feel sad for a little bit, but either like the new guy or hate him and move on. For me, there will always still be an empty spot on the team like there’s an empty spot in Vampire Weekend where Rostam would be.

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“Rule number sixteen,” reads a stoic voice over a video of Russell Westbrook Rockets highlights set to Billie Eilish’s emotionally charged cover of Drake’s “Hotline Bling.” “To get over the past, you first have to accept that the past is over. No matter how many times you revisit it, analyze it, regret it, sweat it, it’s over. It can hurt you no more.”

The things you liked as a teenager make you feel endless, even when you revisit them years later. There’s a reason washed-up young adult authors always include a line about feeling infinite or invincible when trying to crack into the minds of teens they now have little in common with — it’s the one common thread that connects you back to being sixteen. I watch the current Sixers — you know, the one where Ben Simmons is gone and Joel Embiid is a former MVP — and I get sad. There’s an infinity in the 2017-18 Sixers, my Sixers, that I’ll never be able to recapture now that I’m 21 and the years are blowing by faster and faster. When you’re sixteen, there is no notion that your current infinity will eventually end. There is only infinity.

I cannot crawl back into my teenage body. The 2017-18 NBA season is over, and in fact, it’s been over for six years now. There’s no way to get back to it, and I’ve written about that a million times; trust me. The NBA players I metaphorically grew up with are no longer my age and scared. I feel a distance growing between myself and my younger self the past I write about – not to mention the sports around me. I can’t rattle off the Sixers roster like I used to. I watch games at my parents’ house and pretend to know the stats of the end-bench players when asked — because I do this for work, after all. It’s all I think about. The distance between myself and my favorite basketball players, once closed by teenage torment and the magic of the moment, is now growing faster than I can comprehend. 

“I’m glad I don’t do the things I used to anymore,” I grinned at Mothers’ Day dinner in Philly last year, slightly tipsy off the glitzy cocktails I’m finally old enough to order, boasting that I am no longer the stupid, silly girl I used to be. In saying this, I claimed that I no longer misstep. I have a firm grasp of social cues. I can navigate situations that leave most flustered. I am the coolest, most competent and most well-adjusted girl on Earth.

I’m not sure why I said that. I still love that girl in all of her clumsiness and whimsy. Sometimes – most of the time, really – I wish I could reach back in time and grab her hand, shake her by the shoulders, give her some hair products and some life advice. Being sixteen wasn’t that magical. It was mostly just a lot of feeling sick to my stomach over fights with adults on Twitter and begging my parents to drive me to the mall and to concerts where I would pose as a journalist while trying to find a semblance of human connection. It was crying over spilled milk and being convinced all of my friends hated me. It was talking to grown men on the internet who really shouldn’t have wanted anything to do with me. But still, in my personal mythology, my self-written fanfiction of my own life, it was Eagles Super Bowl wins and Sixers playoff runs. It was giggling with my friends on school field trips to Center City and wondering how we’d react, approach, make a move towards friendship if a Sixer, the mythical thing they were, crossed our path. It was feeling infinite and invincible and like my favorite players were my best friends.

The majority of the guys in the Sacred Text are married with kids now, settled down, just years from retiring if not retired already. Some of them have fallen out with each other. Others have fallen out of the league. I’m nearly a fundamentally different person from who I was when I was sixteen. I shouldn’t go around expecting everybody else to stay the same when I’m allowed to change.

In my mind, TJ didn’t leave. Rob and Dario didn’t get traded. Ben kept his Savannah cats of #RaiseTheCat fame and named them Barkley and Stackhouse. Ersan is there. Timothé is there. Sauce Castillo is there. Joel still has them all over for postgame parties at his penthouse that overlooks the Delaware River. They go out for drinks together in Fishtown and have deep conversations under the rainbow lights at Spruce Street Harbor Park. They love each other – and they love each other genuinely, for that matter. Nothing is ever wrong.

That being said, if you put all of these guys back on the same team today, it wouldn’t feel right. If you tossed me back into high school, I would try my hardest to claw my way out just like I did the first time. Nostalgia is merely a rosy gossamer sheet thrown over the past, obscuring the things you’d like to forget, turning the whole thing into an amorphous blob of strawberry Starburst and sunshine.

“The sacred is everywhere we look for it,” reads a linocut print that hangs above my bed in my apartment 150 miles away from my childhood home. I’m not even religious, but I do believe in the sacred, the idea that we’re made of love, the thought that the Universe is kind and that everything happens for a reason, as cruel as that reason may seem in the moment. I promise myself there’s a reason for all the screwed-up things that have happened to me. I promise myself there’s a reason for the Sixers retiring the Frosty Freezeout. There’s a reason TJ left. There’s a reason Rob and Dario were traded, and with crystal-clear hindsight, we all know it. I do think my 2017-18 Sixers are sacred. I don’t think they’re any more sacred than any other season of an NBA team may be to somebody else. After all, somebody did a study once that says the music you listen to between the ages of thirteen and sixteen sticks with you forever – and I think it’s the same way for sports, too.