Jason Young grew up watching his father play basketball and hearing about his legacy. In high school, Robert Young led the Oak Lake Lions to victory in the North Carolina state championship. An injury in college kept him from playing professionally, but he never stopped loving the game. Jason has inherited that same love—and he feels driven to succeed where his father couldn’t. By the time he’s a senior at Oak Lake High School, he has his entire life mapped out. He plans to win the state championships and go on to play basketball at Duke University. On the outside, Jason looks supremely confident, but in reality he is slowly caving under the extreme pressure his father has heaped on him. Jason is expected to be the ultimate basketball star, but senior year provides several daunting tests for the seventeen-year-old. A devastating event and a surprising new passion cause him to question what he really wants from life and whose dreams he is fulfilling., after his father dies in a car accident late after a game against the first place team, in which Jason and the Lions lost at the buzzer. As a result, Jason quits the team and searches for meaning without both his father and the game that once molded him into the young man that he was. After weeks away from the team, Jason finally learns to cope with the loss of his father, and rejoins the team in order to push them into a late playoff run. In the end, not only do Jason and the Lions win the state championship, but they beat the team that stood in their way for four years to get there. (the same team they played when Jason's father tragically died) Post graduation, Jason and his friends go there separate ways. Jason chooses to play his college ball at Wake Forest University instead of Duke, claiming that he always wished to play where his own father played. In the final chapter we realize that Jason's newly developed passion is writing, as he has been documenting the events of his senior year and writing a novel about it.