I was playing basketball at the campus last night. The court is actually atop a kind of bar, right outside the main building. It was probably around 8pm, so dusk was setting in and there weren’t many people about, mostly those heading home.

As the laws of physics dictate, once in a while your shot comes in at an angle such that the friction is sufficient and your ball gets caught between the rim and the glass/board, stuck. This is no big deal, it’s happened to everyone lots of times. As a kid, you can’t reach up there so you have to improvise. If you have a second ball you can hit the ball that’s stuck and dislodge it. Or you can find something else to throw up there. Or you can climb the basket. Or you can fix your bike next to it and reach up from the seat. There are all kinds of possibilities.

Last night, before I had decided what to do, a guy came up the stairs, approaching me, threw down his backpack, muttering something in Dutch with a smile, and jumped for it. It was quite the shocker. Then he said “I saw from down below that your ball got stuck”. First he used his super vision to see, then his super leap to get up there. I was amazed. And just like that, hadn’t asked him or anything, didn’t even have a clue what was going on when he came up the stairs. I mean if he’d been right there, sure I would have seen it coming. But he wasn’t even in the vicinity. And yet he both saw it and decided to help out. Fantastic.

If you’re wondering why he could reach it and I couldn’t, it’s because Holland is a country of giants.