Top 25 of the Last 25 - Part 3, Top 5

Part 1 of my Top 25 of the Last 25 can be found here. And Part 2 here.

The Top 5...

5. The Thrill Wiz Khalifa / The Spins Mac Miller

You can't have Bert without Ernie. You can't inspire radical change without usurping those in power. And you can't listen to The Thrill by Wiz Khalifa without listening to The Spins by Mac Miller. They all just fit hand in hand.

Pittsburgh's proudest productions Mac and Wiz hit the scene around the same time with Mr. Khalifa dropping This Plane in 2009 and Mr. Miller dropping KIDS in 2010, both released by the formerly Steel City-based Rostrum Records. These guys played the anthems. The songs that you and your boys would listen to on the way to a kegger in the woods. Songs to listen to in the car at Makeout Point with your sweetest gal. Songs you rolled your first reggie to. Songs that defined a generation of boardwalk pinnies and flatbrims.

The number 5 spot on this list could've gone to just Mac or even just Wiz but it'd be an injustice along the levels of a Geneva convention violation if I failed to mention both. The way these two songs complimented each other with baseline music provided by Empire of the Sun, That's The Stuff, Man.

4. Learning Alliteration

Until this point in my Top 25 list, I've used roughly 20 different derivatives of alliteration (21). I learned about alliterations from my second grade teacher Ms. Menno in the spring of 2005. Alliterations and similes and metaphors allow anyone to cosplay Hemingway or Faulkner and illustrate imagery through prose a la da Vinci with oils and canvas.

Alliterations slide off the tongue like an oiled-up octopus operating its way through an oyster-occupied obstacle course and they've aided me in my career many times over. I adore alliterations and I hope you do too.

3. Winning the 2013 Inter-Ac Basketball Championship

I was bound to get overly sentimental about at least one of 25 things over the course of the last 25 years, and thinking about my senior year high school basketball season truly makes me happier than thinking about most anything else.

I'll save a lot of the details because there are just so many, but I will share a few.

My papa was a coach for the Germantown Academy boys basketball team for pretty much my entire life up until he hung up the New Balances a few years back. When winter struck Elkins Park in my elementary years, there was only so much to look forward to when pulling into the driveway of ole Saint James. The soft pretzels got staler with a lack of humidity in the air, the chocolate milk cartons had to thaw before consumption, and paper football matches on a field of desktops were played instead of two-hand touch on the blacktop.

But I could always look forward to pulling open GA's double doors and walking into a lobby pervaded by the smog of chlorine and waxed hardwood. I was the sidecar attached to a Marty Harley until we entered those doors. I would become entranced by the echoes of dribbles, the squeaks of sneakers that might've been worn by church mice, and the auditory euphoria of a net's swish. I'd be guided by invisible hand to whatever corner of the gym wasn't being used during practice to work on my own moves so that I, too, could have a star next to my name on the Captain's Board, meaning I had won an Inter-Ac Championship.

Fast forward to a 6'2ish athletically-husky guy who was way way WAY too slow to play guard, and not tall enough to make up for his 17 inch vertical in order to provide real minutes in the post. That's when you accept the title "Glue Guy."

The dream was always to be a 1000 point scorer, join the likes of Cam & Ryan Ayers, Matt Walsh, Devon Goodman. Be The Guy on The Team in southeastern PA. I would've probably had to have taken over 2000 shots to score 1000 points. In a gym by myself.

GA's basketball team had 9 seniors during the 2012-13 season, four of which played college basketball - three that received D1 scholarships and one that was Washington College's finest and handsomest guard in the class of 2017. They won the Inter-Ac league title and the PA state championship.

GA's basketball team had 1 senior during the 2013-14 season. YA BOiiiiiiiiiiiiii!!!!!

The expectation was that the Haverford School would just roll through the league, 10-0, unchallenged like a dump truck taking on a fiat. Fair enough, they had two future NBA players in Cam Reddish and Lamar Stevens with Shizz Alston, Temple's best player of the last decade, running point. They weren't just the best team in our league, they were nationally ranked. Here, take the crown, Fords.

Meant to spare some details so I will, but basically the Main Line Takeover Project was really started when our squad went to D.C. and spent the entire trip together. I had been around the program a long time and everyone always broke off into smaller groups on those trips, but on this one the whole team did everything and went everywhere as a full unit. We went to lunch, sat at the same big ass table in Union Station, then wandered into an FYE and pooled together $120 to buy a discounted Tower speaker to take back on the bus. By no means was there a conscience effort made to keep everyone together, we all just kind of, I don't know, liked each other.

And you can read this and think "yeah the author has fond memories, no way they did that much shit together." We had all 12 players show up and "help" ask 12 different girls to dances as dates in 12 different ways. Graaaaviityyy, is woooooorkinn against me.

Ironically, anti-gravity may have won us the 'chip. Timmy Guers, in the corner, in Haverford's home gym, tosses a fader that defies at least one of Newton's laws, banks off the very tippy top corner of the backboard, and falls for three points. We win the league. We all get a star on the board.

I'll forever have the deepest love for each one of those teammates and I'll never forget that they helped me fulfill a dream seemingly deferred.

Shout out to Coach Weiss, Coach Fenerty, Coach Hannigan, Coach Gallman, Gabe Alter, Eathyn Edwards (aka Squeezy, aka Frozone, aka Mistuh Hop Step), Devon "Boo-Boo" Goodman, Timmy Guers, Sammy Lindgren, Evan-Eric Longino, Kyle McCloskey, Matt Perricone, Joe Stinson, Cole Storm, Bailey Whitman, and Bobby Taggart. We in heeeeeerrrreee TURN UP TURN UP where's the-where's thheee

2. 2005 NCAA National Championships

The legendary Texas-USC Vince Young, Matt Leinart, Reggie Bush Rose Bowl technically occurred in the calendar-year 2006, but it capped off the 2005 NCAA Football season and I make the rules.

Anyone my age that loves sports was likely upping their obsession around this time. Going on 10 years old and thinking that athletes were greater than the Greek gods. Modern-day Adonises by the hundredfold playing a new game to get excited about every night.

Texas vs. Southern Cal and Illinois vs. UNC were two of the greatest games in their respective league histories and they happened just a few months apart.

Vince Young sidearming his way through the SoCal secondary. Leinhart, Bush, LenDale White, and Dwayne Jarrett answering every Longhorn jab with a Trojan uppercut until Vinny just proved too much for the Cardinal and Gold. A 41-38 battle of attrition featuring several future Sunday stars, this game had all you could've asked for as a boy reveling in the allure of athletic achievement.

Raymond Felton, Deron Williams, Sean May, Dee Brown, Rashad McCants, Luther Head, Marvin Williams. Three high school Mr. Basketball awards, six college All-Americans, six first round draft picks and one second-rounder.

Illinois came into the game 37-1 and #1 in the nation, UNC 32-4 and ranked #2. The Tar Heels pretty much controlled the entire game but the hype around it was so phenomenal. It was the best two teams in the country, three of the five best players in the country, and a rising-in-the-ranks coach in Bruce Weber vs. Roy Williams who was sick of being the bridesmaid. 
These games were two of the few times we got to play out the hypothetical "What if the best two teams in the league/country just played for the championship?" Underdog stories and parity are great and touching and engaging, but sometimes there are two teams that are definitively better than every other team and just deserve to square off for all the marbles. We got that not once, but twice in the 2005 college seasons.

1. NBA Live 05 Slam Dunk Contest

Yeah there's a bit of a theme here but life was so much better at 10 years old than it is at almost 30. Mainly because there were little to no (short-term) consequences from sitting in my basement for seven hours on end trying to figure out the perfect timing for Jason Richardson to throw the basketball off a side jumbo tron, do a cartwheel, jump from the free throw line, and then catch the ball mid-air for a between the legs 180 slam. Ha, you thought that was a lot?

Basketball on the ground, rainbow-flip-soccer-move it over your head, catch and immediately toss off the 8 square inch camera face that's suspended 75 feet in the air, hand spring, play patty cake with Dr. J, jump from a step inside the foul line (no bunnies), cover your eyes with the inside of your left elbow, catch the ball BLINDLY, then dunk and hang from the rim by your right elbow.

Alright the second one got away from me but you could do all sort of neat, super unrealistic tricks with the players in this game. It skewed my perception of the real dunk contest for a little bit but so what, the Slam Dunk Contest mode in NBA Live 05 was hands-down, unquestionably, indisputably, 100%, without a shadow of doubt in my mind, the very best anything of the last 25 years.