"You're pretty tall, bet you play basketball, huh?"

First off, I'm not that tall. People have asked me that fairly regularly for years now and that's always my first response. I'm only 6'2." I'm tall for normal people sure, but real basketball players aren't normal people. But yeah, I tell them, I did play. Next question, more often than not: "Can you dunk?"

.....no, no I cannot.

And it's a damn shame. I'm not asking for prime Vinsanity, I just want to dunk.

If you've ever watched basketball, you've probably a seen a dunk. In college basketball and the NBA, they've become commonplace. Almost every day, we see a dunk of the year candidate. For instance, Zach LaVine did this in practice the other day:

Then he did this during a game:

First off, Zach LaVine doesn't have legs, he has large rockets that light to inflict maximum damage on an unsuspecting opponent. But did you hear the announcer's reaction? It was so ho hum that if you only had the audio, you wouldn't know that LaVine just buried Alex Len under a mountain of Internet shame. How do you see that and not want to do it?

Unlike most other American sports, basketball is a fairly simple game to pick up and play. Anyone can make a layup or learn how to shoot a jumper within a few minutes. But not everybody can dunk. From the days of Darryl Dawkins crushing backboards to the legendary 1985 Slam Dunk Contest to last year's crazy reinvention, nothing has ever fascinated me like dunking.

And I still can't do it. I've blocked dunks, multiple times. I can grab the rim. But something changes when you put the ball in my hand. I just can't seem to make it work. But wouldn't it be cool if it did?

Imagine catching the ball on the wing in Madison Square Garden, clock ticking down in a close game as you size up your defender. You hit him with a quick jab step to a crossover and then you're free to the basket. The help-side defender is rotating but he's too late and BAM, two-handed tomahawk to crush his will. You let out a primal scream as you hang just long enough on the rim to make sure that everyone saw what just happened.

That's all I want. I just want to dunk on somebody, real hard, one time. I want them to feel it in their soul, I want them to lie awake at night, tossing and turning, wondering if I was waiting around the corner to do a trash can dunk. I want them to go out and buy a new pair of Jordans, just so they won't get dunked on again.

I'll probably never get a chance to really, truly dunk on somebody. And that's probably okay, because I'd be impossible to be around after that. But every now and then, I see a rim or a high ceiling. And as I jump to touch it (like a middle schooler, I know), I imagine the defender rotating late in MSG and for one moment, maybe I am flying.