Salt Lake City, June 14, 1998. Game 6 of the NBA Finals. There are 41 seconds left, and John Stockton has just hit a three. The Utah Jazz lead the Chicago Bulls 86 to 83, in front of their own crowd.
Do the math and the game is over. Three points down, on the road, with less than a minute to play.
Michael Jordan gets the ball and scores a layup four seconds later. 86 to 85.
Back on defense, he goes after Karl Malone and takes the ball from him.
He brings it up the floor. The clock runs down. With five seconds left, he rises and shoots. 87 to 86. Stockton's last shot misses. The Bulls are champions, and Jordan has 45 points.
If you watched that, you probably didn't just see it. You felt it, and fans' bodies really do react. In two small studies published in 1998, researchers measured male fans' testosterone before and after big games. It rose in the fans of the winning team and fell in the fans of the losing one. The findings, they wrote, suggest that "watching one's heroes win or lose has physiological consequences that extend beyond changes in mood and self-esteem."
That's why we love athletes. They show us hope with nothing hidden. Most of our hope happens in private, where nobody can see how bad the odds are. Theirs happens with a clock on the screen and the score in the corner, and every one of us can see exactly how far behind they are.
Psychologists who study hope describe it as two things working together: agency, the determination to reach a goal, and pathways, the ability to plan ways to get there. Watch those last 41 seconds again and you can see both. Agency is wanting the ball. Pathways is what he does when the shot isn't there: he goes and takes the ball from Karl Malone.
And none of it was luck. When Martin Seligman and Steven Maier looked back at fifty years of research on learned helplessness, they concluded that giving up is the default response to prolonged stress, and that what has to be learned is control. Jordan had spent a career learning it, one miss at a time. In 1997 he'd starred in a Nike ad that began, "I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career."
That's what an athlete gives us. Not the win itself. The proof that a person can stand in the last minute of something, three points down, and still believe there's a way. We borrow that. We take it back into our own last minutes, the ones nobody is filming.
Hope isn't waiting for a miracle. It's wanting the ball.