The stuff of dreams

It wants you to hate it, sometimes. That's how it seems, anyway.

That's how it seems when icons turn out to be frauds and sociopaths (Hello, Lance Armstrong!), and when cheaters prosper (Hey, look, it's the Russians!), and when vile human beings are rewarded with undeserved success (Lookin' at you, Floyd Mayweather!). And then there are the Yankees, the Patriots, Jerry Jones, Roger Goodell, the naked greed and hypocrisy of the NCAA, and whatever gods decided baseball games and the NBA season had to last longer than the reign of the Tudors.

Sport wants you to hate it sometimes. Except, of course, when it doesn't.

What redeems it, what always redeems it, are those moments no scriptwriter in Hollywood could duplicate without getting laughed out of the room. You Can't Make This Stuff Up is not just something people say, when that happens. It's a literal and functioning reality.

And so to a man named Andre Ingram, of whom you likely never heard until that aforementioned Stuff starting happening to him.

Ingram is a 32-year-old guard with a well-behaved jump shot who's been chasing the dream for 10 years, and he's never come close to catching it. For a full decade, he's been riding buses and bunking in We'll Leave The Light On For You joints from hither to yon ""hither" and "yon" being mere aliases for places like Grand Rapids and Canton, O., and Portland, Me., and, yes, Fort Wayne. After a decade doing all that and tutoring kids in math so he could keep doing it, he was an NBA G-League lifer if ever there was one.

And then, wondrously, he wasn't.

Then there was the day last week when he walked into his G-League coach's office for an end-of-the-season debriefing, and Coach dropped the big one: He, Andre Ingram, was being called up by the Lakers.

After 10 long years, he was going to the League.

If the story ended right there it would still be enough to get the script thrown back in your face by every producer who ever commanded a corner table at Spago. But you know what happened next?

What happened next, Tuesday night, was the Lakers put Andre Ingram in the game against the best team in the NBA Western Conference this season, the Houston Rockets.

He hit his first shot.

Then he hit his second shot.

Then he hit his third shot, and then his fourth, and went on to score 19 points on 6-of-8 shooting, including four 3-pointers in five tries. Oh, yeah: He also blocked three shots on the defensive end in a 105-99 loss.

"It was once in a lifetime," Ingram said later.

And how are you gonna hate that?