A three-on-three full-court pickup game is underway at the East End basketball court on a balmy Friday night in July. The air is dense, salty. The players sweaty, smiling, but serious.
“Anyone can come and play,” Jay Luster says. He’s talking to Radoslav Tsanev; the two met a minute ago on the court. Luster, 34, a Provincetown native, takes charge of organizing pickup basketball in town. Tsanev, 26, is from Bulgaria and spending his inaugural summer in town, working at Relish.
“I just came here to work on my handstand,” Tsanev says, excited to have crossed paths with Luster’s crew during his evening workout.
The game reaches an anticlimactic end. Everyone mills around the court. Tired. Laughing.
Here, strangers become friends over a shared love of a game. Bonds are forged. Memories made. It turns out the East End basketball court is a microcosm of the town around it.
“I got my first dunk here,” says Nico Harrington, 18, grinning with the ball under his arm. Harrington, a recent graduate of Nauset Regional High School and soon-to-be UMass Boston student, lives in Truro with his mother and brother. He is six-foot-seven. Some elements of the game come easy to him. But, he says, “This is where I learned a lot about life.”
“I was just here, and they showed up,” says Ben Christie, 18. Christie, visiting from Ireland for a couple of weeks, had come to shoot hoops solo but was happy to join a pickup game.
Anthony Teixeira, 18, catching his breath courtside, says, “I just wish they’d put in lights.” Teixeira, who is from Chelsea, has spent his summers in Provincetown since age five and has been playing on the East End court since he was eight.
It’s getting dark. Harrington tosses the basketball into the hoop on his way to his car. Teixeira grabs it for one last triumphant dunk. The court empties out.
Luster leans up against the fence, looks out onto the empty court, and reflects. “This court,” he says, “is definitely a special place.”