The greatest of them all, Harvey Haddix's twelve perfect innings before a loss, doesn't count at all.
Perfection stands forever. The Gettysburg Address has merely two-hundred seventy words. The 1972 Miami Dolphins' Perfect Season may never be repeated with an ever-longer season, the salary cap, the NFL draft, free agency, and scheduling parity. We celebrate perfection while moving the goal posts to prevent perfection.
Winning a Nobel Prize reaches another elite level. But genius has limits. In Michael Lewis' The Undoing Project, Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann pontificates about all things at a gathering. Psychologist Amos Tversky tells the quark discoverer, “You know, Murray, there is no one in the world who is as smart as you think you are…” The smartest guy in the room never boasts about it.
Achieving perfection in basketball seems unattainable.
The greatest regular season in NBA history came up just short of ninety percent wins.
Villanova won an upset National Championship in 1985 by shooting an astonishing 78.6 percent from the field and sinking sixteen more free throws than the Hoyas.
In Madeleine Blois' excellent In These Girls Hope Is a Muscle, the Amherst Lady Hurricanes overcome internal struggles to capture a blowout state championship in a near-perfect performance.
Bill Walton's 21 of 22 field goal during UCLA's NCAA Championship win over Memphis rubbed elbows with perfection.
Admiral McRaven tells us that "one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed." We will never reach perfection but ask "how can I improve today?"
Lagniappe: Scoring at the rim still matters. Don Kelbick shares.
Lagniappe 2: 1-4 versus 1-3-1 Halfcourt Trap
Lagniappe 3: Close in on perfection.
"To learn to stand up in the storm, but to have compassion on those who fall. To master yourself before you seek to master others...to learn to laugh yet never forget how to weep."