But he misses.

  And Purdue fouls Jerome, a one-and-one with 5.9 seconds on the clock.

  —Excellent call by Purdue, says Chris. You don’t want to risk even a three point attempt. Better to give up two here.

  Jerome’s first shot goes through. Two-point game. He lines up for the second. Phil, in agony.

  —Jerome is…short! Batted by Diakite! Gonna be a scramble in the backcourt! Little Kihei Clark has it, all of five-foot-ten! Virginia has a final chance here—Clark to Diakite—to win it—yes! No, Brian corrects himself, to tie! We’re all square at seventy!

  Replay confirmed it. The shot off Diakite’s fingertips before the buzzer, the series of movements leading up to it so elegant as to be almost balletic. Clark’s pass like Grant Hill’s in 1992, except in full motion from the court, without the luxury of five seconds to inbound. Diakite like Christian Laettner, but lovable. As they played it over and over in ever-slower motion, the announcers going apeshit, I saw a note of something else. Perhaps you’ll say it’s a stretch, hyperbole; that Chris Webber would have seen it himself, having been on the wrong end enough times—but look again at the video. There was a flash in that moment, in Mamadi, of Michael. Yes, that Michael. Holy father of the midrange jumper. Mortal god of Air. The man who could fly.

  —Look at Phil Fayeton right now. You think he’s happy? You think he’s pumped up?

  —He’s incandescent, Brian.

  —Sunny’s with him. Let’s go to Sunny. Sunny?

  The roar of the crowd is so intense it’s clearly hard for them to hear each other, and Sunny leans close—too close. Raleigh’s pain looked almost physical, and maybe was.

  —Raleigh, are you all right?

  —Just Braxton-Hicks, she said, bracing for another false contraction as the game cut to commercial.

  —This overtime made possible by: Mercury Incorporated, who reminds you again to pay like a god.

  —My goodness, can you believe what we have here, says Brian. Overtime after a play for the ages—that mad rush—Diakite true at the buzzer. Five more minutes on the clock, now. Five minutes to draw the line between Elite and Final; between whose story has another chapter, and whose comes to an end.

  Purdue again controls the tip but turns it over. They score on their next possession though; Jerome answering. Seventy-two all. Trading fouls, drives. Virginia up one with twenty-seconds, and Edwards misses. They have to foul. Less than six seconds left, with two shots coming for Guy.

  —Phew, those are some epic free throws, says Brian. Phil Fayeton can’t handle it! Look at him. He’s going ballistic, and I don’t blame him. The Cavs up three but Purdue still has a chance, because Edwards has been fire.

  It is almost anti-climactic, the finale, like a false contraction. Edwards doesn’t miss the last shot—he never gets to take one.

  —Forty-two points in the game, says Chris. And he lost it on a pass.

  Or—did Virginia win it with one? With, that is, vicious pack-line defense? With good passing—efficiency—patience? With Hunter, yes, but also Guy, Jerome; Mamadi Diakite. This was still a team’s team—our team’s team. Our including mine. Remember numbers and fans are helpful in foresight; recall the wisdom of crowds. And now, our team’s team, wise and sighted, replete with prophets and oracles, sibyls and bards, forecasters-cum-sportscasters—foreshadowers, diviners, and literal palmists. Fanatics, bracketologists, and Washington wizards. Mediums. Readers, too. Yes, you, even you. All of us, turning the page and going to the holy grail, to the finality marked by that most auspicious of even numbers, the smallest composite, quadrilateral and perfectly square.

  —This is Tony Bennett’s first trip to the Final Four, following in the footsteps of his father, who also beat Purdue to do so, said Brian. Over to Sunny Sanders, who’s with him now.

  —Congratulations, Coach. Huge win. This will be Virginia’s first trip to the Final Four since 1984. How does it feel?

  —Ah, pretty darn good. What a game. Purdue is a heck of a team. I can’t tell you how proud I am of these guys, Tony said, immediately turning it over to them, content to smile his winning smile, the kind that can never truly lose.

  —Kyle: He’s giving all the credit to you, to your teammates. Tell me about this win.

  —Coach is always saying you have to be able to lose together first, said Kyle Guy, and he’s right. This win is better because we lost like that. And we have the best fans! Phil’s making history this year, too! Where is that guy? Man, get him down here!

  He was on the phone when the cameras found him, as security escorted him to the floor. It wasn’t with Raleigh, who sat beside me very quietly, watching. He rang off and someone gave him a matching hat, thrust him into the midst of the team as the confetti poured down.

  * * *

  —

  It was Phil who made the first cut to the net, clipping it like a bird’s wings. Phil who, at the top of the ladder, stared into the fiery ring, and, weightless and beaming, held up that first white piece of string, signifying everything.

  * * *

  —I want to know every fucking thing about him, Arun Patil shouted at a collection of executives and attorneys and assistants when Virginia won. I want to know who he’s been talking to. I want to know how much money is in his bank account. I want to know every point of weakness, every skeleton in his closet. Nothing is too small, people. I want to know what Phil Fayeton ate for fucking breakfast—

  Arun had paid little attention to the early rounds. Though he considered it good exercise, Arun was not, especially, a basketball fan—for five-foot-nine “meritocratic” reasons largely akin to mine. He balked at time spent watching it, or any sport for that matter, considering it a wasteful opportunity cost. His related assets—the DaedaDome, et cetera—were exactly that: assets, useful in their disproportionate emotional value to others. By the tail end of the Sweet Sixteen, though, he began to worry; by the Elite Eight, no small amount. Phil wasn’t thinking about it this way yet, and wouldn’t until incepted, but every win he predicted correctly was, mathematically, a form of sunk cost. With Phil having entered the Elite Eight still perfect, the probability of him guessing the remaining seven games was—at worst, even with coin-flip math—one in one-hundred twenty-eight. Arun Patil did not like those odds. He liked them less still after Texas Tech advanced—one in sixty-four. Just as, at the tournament’s beginning, every new game shrunk the probability of perfection exponentially, with every hurdle Phil now passed, the remaining odds grew—quite vexingly for Arun—exponentially in Phil’s favor.

  —now, or else somebody’s getting fired! said Arun. Maybe I should fire one out of every thirty-two employees…. Nah, nah, I’m just kidding.

  But it wasn’t particularly clear that he was. Through little fault of their own, Arun’s legal team had given barely a cursory review to the whole gambit. This had not really been a bet, but a gimmick. And while Arun obviously had the funds, liquidity was another matter, as was orchestrating a cash payment of that size with tax efficiency. Then there was the principle of the thing. Arun was a competitive man. The idea of wiring a billion dollars to some bozo over basketball simply didn’t sit right with him. It wouldn’t have even if his team had been prepared for the potentiality, even if his divorce settlement hadn’t likewise been looming.

  * * *

  —

  Arun Patil graduated from my other, more famous alma mater in 1984, the same year the University of Virginia had last appeared in the Final Four, the same year Phil Fayeton was born. He did not, like several of his peers, drop out—his immigrant parents would have either killed him or died themselves—going instead much the way of Miles, spending just enough time on Wall Street to amass the impression of, if not the actual capital required for, risking his own rather than his parents’ money. According to legend, Arun first conceived the search engine in 1989, though he didn’t manage to launch his Merged Electronic Reader Option Provider Environment (MEROPE) until 1993. It was a spectacular failure. Arun excelled at bringing attention to his product; he had a publicist’s Midas touch, but this is a mixed blessing when your product kind of sucks. MEROPE struggled to separate relevant results from irrelevant ones in the internet’s primordial ocean, and it wasn’t getting any better. Arun had spent all the money he’d made and then some. The burgeoning industry mocked him, and his first marriage increasingly floundered. Why couldn’t he go back to investment banking? His wife wanted children. By 1996, she’d had enough, serving him papers the day before he flew to Palo Alto to meet a Stanford graduate student with whom he’d been emailing. Her name was Laurie Page.

  True genius, whether it be in art or science, statistics, literature, basketball, or sex—is often a matter less of aptitude than of dialectic. Together, Arun and Laurie gutted MEROPE, replacing its algorithm with PageRank, a cute double entendre that estimated the importance of a website by recursively weighing the number of links to it, indexing the internet in modeling the probability of a random surfer landing on a given page. It was, in essence, an oracle based on the wisdom of crowds. They desperately needed a rebrand, but the trade name Oracle was already taken. Instead they settled on Daedalus. Not a literal prophet, but still a kind of one, an inventor and an artist; a figure who made things and made things happen. Daedalus could hand you the thread you needed to lead you out of the labyrinth, because Daedalus had built the labyrinth.

  Arun’s parents gave him another few hundred thousand dollars, to which Laurie’s added significantly once they “formally incorporated”—married—in 1998. Daedalus Search grew exponentially into the early aughts under Laurie’s technical leadership while Arun spun the narrative. Instead of shying away from MEROPE’s former challenges, he leaned into them, crafting a story of perseverance, reinvention. It gave their IPO an even more favorable anchor—its comparison point not nothing, but even less. The comeback story is, after all, the great narrative of America. We love its extremities, the intoxicating risk of spectacular success, all the more when it’s born of spectacular failure. What America hates—the one thing it will never forgive—is abiding mediocrity.

  None of this is particularly conducive to sustainability or balance or a growing family. Laurie stepped back a bit with the births of their children, more when she physically lost her voice—but by that time, in 2013, Daedalus Industries had not only fully conquered search but become a leader in myriad other computing endeavors, buoyed by the kind of scale that can fill almost any gap inorganically. In his wife’s relative absence, Arun acquired voraciously: apps, movie studios, sports arenas, the Washington Post, a gigayacht so big it had its own “support yacht,” and, in 2018, the thirty-year-old mononymous Belgian supermodel, Persa.

  It would have been convenient for Arun to blame the Phil debacle on the stress of his ongoing divorce, the billions he’d be paying Laurie far in excess of her own shares. Perhaps even on his more pleasant distractions—all that yachting with Persa. But the truth was Arun was far too shrewd a storyteller and statistician alike. It was Arun himself who’d thought to offer a billion dollars for a perfect bracket—not as a company, but a personal bet. It was irresistible: an astronomical prize for an event of infinitesimal rarity, a scanty promise of tantalizing value. The kind of story that linked-to stories would inevitably link to. Guaranteed virality. He’d absolutely loved it, until he didn’t.

  How had Phil done it? Arun wondered. He had to have cheated somehow. But him? This guy? A mastermind? He didn’t seem capable of it.

  The form these thoughts assumed for Arun had the tenor not of moral admiration but practical insult. Which was why he wanted to meet Phil himself. If there was foul play, he’d call it out. One of his assistants got Phil on the line, and Arun watched his shifts in expression intently on the television as they talked.

  * * *

  Phil and Raleigh arrived early in the owner’s suite at the DaedaDome the following evening to watch Auburn–Kentucky on its big screen, initially joined by several Daedalus senior executives, but not Arun himself. Sheila Campau had also extended Phil another invitation, even going so far as to dangle the offer of a position on her staff, but by this point Phil was thinking bigger. It should probably concern us that even Phil—a lobbyist, a former congressional staffer—easily prioritized a tech billionaire over a US Senator, all the more so for its failure to surprise. But Phil’s social media followers were by then in the millions, and the West was calling: that lingering Manifest Destiny we can still sometimes see if we squint at the Pacific coast. He’d woken up to calls from LA talent agents, pitching their services, wooing him. Choose soon, they said. Win or lose, he didn’t want to be without an agent at the height of his fame—someone who could help him monetize effectively, secure the best deals at the apex of his marketability. He said he’d think about it. He wanted to meet Arun Patil first—nearly as much as Arun wanted to meet him.

  Arun still preferred a delayed entrance. Not just for its customary optics, the power implicit in making someone wait, but in having long since discovered the performative influence of his presence on others. He knew it would be better to give his guests time to acclimate; to set them at ease. He wanted Phil to have a few drinks first, for some of his people to form a casual rapport with him, and to watch it all unfold unobserved from another room.

  Per Arun’s wishes, his team had, in the past week, conducted not just background checks but what amounted to political opposition research on Phil. His affinity for Virginia was direct, obvious; for Texas Tech, familial. Michigan State–Duke, the game to be played that night in the DaedaDome, might have been a toss-up: two top programs run by legendary coaches with histories of over-performance in the tournament. Thoroughly unsurprising for a Virginia fan—routinely pummeled by and no doubt envious of Duke—to be led by desire and give the edge to MSU.

  But Auburn was a mystery. A five-seed, a team who had never made the Final Four, over perennial power Kentucky as a two? When Phil predicted the other three fives losing to twelves in Round 1? Nothing in his background explained it, nor did statistics—at least none of the models Arun’s team had looked at or run. Where could Phil have gotten access to greater quantitative horsepower than at Daedalus Industries? Had he adapted some political polling model? But Arun had spoken to Nate Silver, and FiveThirtyEight was as flummoxed as his team was. Was it possible Phil had developed some highly sophisticated novel estimation model himself? The more Arun saw of him, the less likely it seemed. Phil was wrapped up in the game with no evident calculation, akin to in his live TV appearances, flush with the pure emotion of an ardent fan.

  And yet, there had been a subtle shift in Phil’s affect since the previous day. His cheers for Auburn possessed all their customary enthusiasm, but when the Tigers got off to a slow start, his expression bore little sign of terror. It was closer to bemusement, as if trying to work out less whether than how they’d manage to come back. Was this hubris? Or did he know something? Arun had every indication Phil had neither the funds nor the network to throw this game or any other. Kentucky was looking so sharp Arun wondered if he’d even have to worry about it, if he could stroll in with condolences masked as congratulations, pose for a few photos, and leave early, his gimmick again a gimmick, and a wildly successful one. But by half Auburn had cut the Wildcats’ lead from eleven to five, and less than three minutes into the second it was tied—then Auburn up a triple. Phil was euphoric, embracing not just his wife but Arun’s associates, who seemed to have undertaken their assignment a little too believably, cheering alongside Phil as the lead bounced back and forth.

  Auburn was down two with forty seconds left. Enough time for them to score, but also enough for Kentucky to win on a final shot. But the latter didn’t go in, sending the game to overtime.

  —Fuck! said Arun, grabbing a fresh shirt.

  While he was composing himself, Auburn went up two, four, six in overtime. There were less than two minutes left.

  Arun barreled into the owner’s suite:

  —I will give you a million dollars right now to call off the bet.

  He regretted this offer the moment it escaped his lips. Phil, rising to his full height, smiled down at him, almost with a look of pity.

  —I don’t think so, man, said Phil.

  —Phil, said Raleigh, implicitly urging him to consider it.

  —No, babe. Auburn’s gonna win.

  —There are other games left, said Arun, appealing more now to Raleigh, and feeling the need, in having made a mistake, to convince himself it hadn’t been one by doubling down. Ten million.

  —No, said Phil, more emphatically this time, almost unthinkingly, as Auburn drove in for a layup.

  Arun bided his time, until Kentucky again got within three. There were thirteen seconds left.

  —Offer stands, he said quietly.

  —Phil, Raleigh whispered to him. Ten million dol—

  But the game was over. Auburn had prevailed.

  —Anything can happen in March! The commentator marveled.

  Arun was not so sure, but, with effort, smiled nonchalantly. One in sixteen, he thought.

  —Congratulations, he said.

  —Thanks, said Phil, shaking his hand. It’s great to meet you, by the way.

  —You, too, said Arun, no longer meaning it.

  * * *

  —

  I can hear your objections mounting. That until this point, at least I’d been in the Fayetons’ direct proximity. How could I have, even retroactively, achieved such intimate access to someone like Arun Patil? Simple divination strains credulity, and journalistic effort brands a fraud. Better chalk it up to delusions of grandeur—as if the difference between confidence and delusion hasn’t generally been a little extra skin and muscle hanging between the legs. Women are always, on some level, unreliable narrators. Victims. But do not mistake my victimhood for weakness—this isn’t like old times. There are advantages to victimhood, narratively, and I know how to take advantage of them. My unreliability frees me from any burden of proof. Consider that before Veblen there was George Eliot; before Girard, Flaubert. Remember every great novel is an unbelievable truth.