Stay In The Game

By: Sara Honikman

I don’t follow sports. At all. In all my life, I don’t think I’ve watched five consecutive minutes of basketball. I didn’t even watch Game 4 of the Championship, but this has been a historic moment for New York basketball fans, so naturally I was a little curious.

Every 45 minutes or so, I found myself opening my phone to check the score. Every time I checked, it looked as if they were losing. It looked bad. Really bad.

By halftime, the Knicks were down 29 points. People had stopped believing. Some fans stopped watching. Others began talking about what went wrong instead of what could still happen.

Yet, in the locker room, OG Anunoby reportedly told his teammates:

“Stay with it. We’re fine. We know it’s a game of runs. We’re a resilient group. We’ve been through a lot. We’ve come back plenty of times when we were down.”

That’s what struck me.

Not the comeback.

The belief.

The refusal to decide the outcome of a game before it was over.

The refusal to declare defeat in their own minds.

I keep thinking about this moment and naturally, as a mother, educator, and fitness coach, I’m inspired by how we can make it a life lesson for ourselves and our children.

Even if we don’t care about basketball, we all know what it feels like to lose. We all know what it feels like to be in the middle of something hard and think we know how the story ends.

But you could be in the last seconds of the hardest moment of your life and still not know how it’s going to end.

Our emotions are terrible fortune tellers. More often than not, they cloud our judgment, especially during the hardest moments of our lives.

I would imagine that for many of the players, it was difficult to continue playing when they were losing that badly. But for the Knicks, there was no choice. They had to stay in the game until the final buzzer.

In our own lives, we don’t always have that same structure. Very often, we have to choose to stay in the game even when it seems like all is lost.

Imagine if you had a coach standing over your shoulder during the hardest moments of your life. Every time self-doubt crept in, your coach leaned over and said:

“You’re still breathing. So, you know what that means? You’re still in the game. Keep going.”

You can fail over and over through the same challenge and succeed on the tenth attempt. Yet so often, we let fear convince us that because something feels impossible, it must be impossible.

The reason this game is being called one of the greatest comebacks in NBA history is not simply because they won; it’s because of the odds they overcame to get there. The craziest part of the story is that the outcome wasn’t apparent until the final 1.2 seconds of the game.

If we can walk away with any lesson from what we witnessed, it is this: Don’t let a “feeling” decide something for you.

As humans we feel that if something is tough and challenging, then the outcome must be negative. That just because we’re struggling, we’ve already lost.

Remember:

Being uncomfortable is not the same thing as being defeated.

Something hard is not the same thing as something impossible.

So much of our suffering comes from assumptions. We decide ahead of time what is going to happen. We tell ourselves: “There’s no way I can do that.”

We create stories before the evidence exists. And when we define ourselves, we confine ourselves.

Think about self-limiting beliefs and what’s behind them: usually emotions like fear, shame, or disappointment.

The truth is that there are outcomes in life that only Hashem controls. We have agency over our effort, our attitude, and our choices, but we do not control the result.

There’s a reason people say, “Man plans and G-d laughs.”

Studies find that people who see the glass as half full rather than half empty report greater happiness and a better quality of life. If you’re holding an 8 oz. glass with 4 ounces of water, you get to decide whether the glass is half empty or half full. Remember: the glass will always hold 4 ounces of water, but how you interpret the “glass of water” (substitute anything here) determines your frame of mind, your attitude, and how you experience that “glass of water,” whether positive or negative.

While you can’t control every outcome, you do influence how you experience the journey.

Research on elite athletes has found that one of the things that separates the best performers is the dialogue they have with themselves. The people at the top are not always the strongest or most talented. They are often the ones who refuse to quit mentally when things look bad.

People like OG Anunoby in that locker room at halftime.

When things feel overwhelming, notice your thoughts. Go for a walk. Step on the grass. Look at something beautiful. Put your hand on your heart. Take a breath.

Remember that feelings move: they arrive and then they pass.

Maybe this is your game.

Maybe you’re in the part where it looks impossible.

Maybe you’re at halftime and the scoreboard isn’t looking great.

But you’re still here.

The game isn’t over because there’s still time on the clock.

You’re still breathing.

Which means you’re still in the game.

The Knicks were getting crushed. Not just losing—losing badly. And yet, in the final moments, everything changed.

What happened that night was an anomaly—a unique comeback that has never happened before and will likely never happen again.

But it did happen.

If your takeaway from this game isn’t inspiration and a renewed sense of belief that the impossible can happen, then you’re missing the gift of it.

Going forward, when you feel hopeless and want to give up, I challenge you to pause, take a deep breath, and say: “1.2 seconds.”

You can be in the last 1.2 seconds of the hardest challenge of your life and still not know how it ends.

The next time your child wants to give up, remind him or her of those last few seconds.

Because everything can change.

You do not know how the story ends.

And until you take your very last breath, you’re still in the game. 

Sara Honikman is a special education teacher and women’s fitness instructor in the Five Towns. She holds dual master’s degrees in General and Special Education and is a NASM Certified Personal Trainer. Drawing from her experience in education, fitness, and child development, she enjoys writing about resilience, personal growth, and the lessons that help people flourish both inside and outside the classroom.