How do you know when it’s time to hang it up? How can you tell when a lifetime of love for playing the game of basketball gives way to the rest of your life simply watching it? How do you know when it’s time?

I suppose I’ve felt it coming for awhile now, but refused to recognize it. Refused to acknowledge the pain in my knees, and the swelling that remained three or four days after my usual Wednesday night game. Refused to admit that the wear and tear of 50 years on the basketball court just might be getting the best of me. I was going to defy the odds and play until I was into my 60s, I always said. Could it really be coming to an end?

Getting hooked

I fell in love for the first time when I was about 6 years old. Fell in love with a ball and the hoop my dad put in our driveway, the hoop that rattled the house every time the ball hit it, and the driveway that led to the multi-paned windows on the garage door that had about as much of a chance of survival as a fish on opening day. We’d play in that driveway for hours, and when I wasn’t playing I was dribbling the ball around my neighborhood streets.

When I was 7, I joined the Ballard Boys Club in Seattle and my first real basketball team. The Club became my second home. I would practice for hours, just shooting and dribbling, shooting and dribbling. And dreaming. Dreaming that when the time came to go to junior and senior high schools, I would play and star on those teams. And that would lead to college stardom, and …

Basketball, and sports in general, were different in the late ’50s and early ’60s. No one had ever heard of “select” teams and no one, save a few lucky guys who could afford it, ever went to a real basketball camp. We played basketball during basketball season, then that gave way to baseball, golf and tennis during the spring and summer, followed by football in the fall. The notion of playing basketball the whole year around was virtually unthinkable, though I always felt that whatever I did was preparing me for next year’s basketball season, the season I really lived for.

Learning from the best

We learned the game from our coaches and from watching the college and pro teams that periodically interrupted weekend programming on ABC, NBC or CBS. We were light years from cable sports and ESPN, but, despite that, we were able to follow our favorite teams and players pretty well. Well enough to be awestruck by a player like Elgin Baylor as he starred for Seattle University and later the Minneapolis and Los Angeles Lakers. And well enough to be captivated by a little guy from Holy Cross who went on to play for the Boston Celtics, Bob Cousy. For me, a shorter kid, there was no one like Bob Cousy. He proved you didn’t have to be tall to play the game, to play it well and to contribute to a winning team.

Like most dreams, mine of starring for my high-school team and paving my way to college went up in a vapor. I was good enough to make the teams in junior high and high school but not quite good enough to compensate for being 5-foot-8, and a little too slow to get after the guys I was guarding who were six or seven inches taller.

After high school, when many of my former teammates either went on to play college ball or quit the game altogether, I continued to play. At lunch. In the evening. On weekends. Whether for rec-league teams or organized leagues through the Washington Athletic Club, I played, and played pretty well. There were no cheerleaders to impress, and the box score wasn’t in the paper the next day, but it was competition and it was fun. And there was always room for improvement. I think I played my best basketball in my late 30s and into my 40s.

I was probably 26 or 27 when a bunch of guys I’d casually known in college got together to rent the gym at The Lakeside School, made famous later not by us but rather by Bill Gates, an alumnus and co-founder of Microsoft. (This may be a reach but I’d bet we spent more time in that gym than he did and, in spite of being the richest man in the world, I’m guessing he can’t go to his left.)

Challenging ourselves

As one might expect, the greatest challenge we have faced over the years, aside from the occasional disruption caused by the unavailability of the gym (rather than not play, of course, we would find another location — the fear being that if we lost momentum, we’d simply give it up), was attrition. Imagine that, as guys went through their 40s and into their 50s, some were actually deciding to quit! How could they do it, I wondered? What would they do to take its place? So what if most of the guys playing with now were half our age, many of them sons (or daughters) of guys we’d played with for years, and so what if the pace of play was 10 times faster than what it had been 30 years ago when we were their age? This was basketball and it was supposed to be fast. I will admit, however, that one night a few of us older guys faced a harsh reality: not only were the young guys faster than we used to be, but they were faster than we had ever been!

Always a hoopster

I’m sure there are sports out there that take more out of a player than basketball does, but if there are I don’t want to try them. It’s hard, but fun work, and it’s true that the only way to get in shape for basketball is to play basketball. It is also true that over time, the body suffers — not just from injury but from wear and tear.

And it’s this wear and tear that now has my attention. Last Wednesday, after playing for about 20 minutes, I asked one of the guys on my team, a 46-year-old pharmacist, what it meant when 1,000 milligrams of Ibuprofen wasn’t sufficient to keep my knees from hurting, he said, “It means we’re getting old.” Maybe the reality has struck that at age 57 I’ve run my last fast break, hit my last bank shot from 20 feet that really was intended to go off the glass and, for my teammates’ sake, thrown my last bad pass to the guy who was open two seconds ago but not when the ball finally got there.

Oh, there can always be the occasional pickup game here or there, and my youngest daughter may need a coach when she gets to the age where she wants to play and just can’t seem to learn to dribble with her left hand, no matter how hard she tries. Hopefully when that time comes, I’ll still be able to tell my left from my right and will still be able to show her how Bob Cousy passed the ball behind his back to Bill Russell going full speed down the lane in the Boston Garden.

Let’s see, when she’s 10, I’ll be just 63. I’ll have played into my 60s after all.

Tom Hawley is a Bellevue-based mortgage broker who lives in North Bend.