“It doesn’t get any better than this,” I texted Brendan minutes before the start of the 2016 NCAA Finals in Houston. “It’s weird. It’s surreal.” Brendan’s answer was a perfect description of the collective energy in the arena that night and the special magic that brought him to that precise moment in time.

The basketball angels worked overtime to turn a life-long dream to go to the NCAA Finals into something transcendent;  Brendan was not only witnessing basketball history but realizing a personal dream. Underneath all the plans was a deep desire to see our team, Villanova, win the tournament.

And that’s precisely what happened when Villanova Guard Kris Jenkins lifted his hands in the air to shoot the 2016 NCAA Championship-winning basket. Some call it luck, magic, or ‘the stars’ when everything falls into place and life flows with indescribable grace.

While these are fitting descriptions for the powerful yet invisible life forces, I think a better description is ‘kairos,’ a stepping out of the world of chronological time into a dramatically different reality. Kairos is an ancient Greek word that means ‘supreme moment.’ The Greeks had two words for time: chronos and kairos. Chronos is the quantitative dimension of time, and kairos is qualitative,  ”a moment of indeterminate time in which everything happens.” 

If you watched the game, you know exactly what I mean. We stepped out of time when the ball left Jenkins hands until the moment when it went through the hoop. In that moment, time stood still and waited for us.