You can go to every high-end sports camp, get personal coaching from the world's best trainers, spend years studying every pro's game until you can't have a dream without a basketball in your hand, but there's still one thing that you can't ever earn.

Instinct.

Honestly, it doesn't get used a lot. After decades of researching the game at the professional level, ballers have hacked the system. And by the system, I mean themselves. There was a time when floor awareness was instinct, some players just knew where everyone was around them, whether it was through sense of smell or hearing, they could map the hardwood without thinking. But then players learned to mask their steps, change their soap, any artifice to break instinct's advantage and recover the value of expensive, high-end training programs. Hey, assistant coaches have to eat.

But there's no sound in the world quite like a crowd reacting to genuine, unfiltered instinct. The kind that no coach can bottle and no player can expect. Even for someone like me, having forgotten more games than I can count, when I hear that sound from the crowd, it's confirmation that I will never forget what I just saw.

Shannon Hickman (Kangaroo Rat, G) is not a player that draws attention. She's quick and got a great vertical which would make up for her below average shooting if she had any D. The Bakersfield-born rodent is lucky to be in the league and luckier still to be playing for a team close to home. No doubt the Thrust were inspired by the last time they picked a player from Central California. I mean, at least "Shick" can dunk.

That's certainly what she was thinking in the nail-biting final seconds of a cross-conference match against the Voodoo. With the shot clock turned off in the 4th quarter, Shannon was shifting her feet like the hardwood was hot sand. She didn't belong out there, and she knew it, the bench guard forced into the field by a teammate's injury. Maybe that shifting convinced the opposing guard to take that deep woods pass on the transition, looking to burn up the clock and preserve their one point lead. And maybe it was that shifting that let Shick poke her paw out at just the right time to tap the pass and free it for the fast break.

The crowd jumped to their feet as Shick got the dream play. With her combined speed and high vertical, she had the time to rush the iron and dunk the rock for the go-ahead bucket, giving her the chance to be featured on every nightly sports broadcast in the country. It's the kind of opportunity few young players ever achieve and only one ever blew. Twice. In the same game. We call blowing it after him now.

But before Shick could worry about that, something else came up. And I mean up. It's hard not to notice Kinny DeMarcus (Hairy Bush Viper, G/F), one of the most unique players in the league, but somehow when he goes low and slithers on the hardwood, he's hard to spot, especially when the ballhandler has her eyes on the iron. He's also fast, so fast he startled me with how quick he got in front of Shannon and snapped upward with his hand to block just at the moment she'd taken off from the kennel. And for a split second, you could see Shannon's eyes get wide as saucers as she found herself sailing through the air toward a big red snake's open mouth with fangs gleaming and venom dripping. I can't imagine what sort of ancestral fear must have taken hold.

I can't, because I don't think any did. In a moment that got that crowd to gasp in the way that tells me I will never forget what I just saw, Shick twisted her tail, turned in mid-air, lifted her feet, and kicked off Kinny's abdomen, pushing him back. The viper opened his mouth wider and reached further for the ball, but by then Shannon swapped her overhead dunk for a field goal, leaning back for the off-balance fadeaway as her long legs held those fangs just far enough to breathe. With her focus entirely on building a new shot in mid-air, you could tell from how she gritted her buck teeth how hard it was not to look right into the poison-dripping maw in front of her. Yet somehow, she got the release over Kinny's extended claws.

I won't tell you whether she made the shot or not--this story is about players, not standings. You can look it up if you have to. All I know is that no one ever taught Hickman that play. I'm sure team coordinators are already analyzing the video frame-by-frame to figure out a dozen countermeasures to what I've heard Shannon's teammates call "the Central Cali Fade." But, at least for now, everyone who saw that play knew they saw real, genuine instinct. And that's something you keep with you forever.

T. Matt Latrans

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I haven't made a Furballer cover in literally 11 years. And man, it's fun. Glad to know the assets still work with modern Photoshop.

Those who know me as "Carrizo" might not know that name is taken from the Carrizo Plain, a natural area in the Southwest corner of the California Central Valley where I grew up, over the mountains West of Bakersfield. A few years back, a research project there was looking into the giant kangaroo rats native to that area and discovered that when local snakes strike, sometimes these strong-legged rats will jump and kick the snake away with their legs leaping to safety. There's some really cool video of it, too.

It inspired this idea. And lucky for me, not only is  pac an absolutely outstanding artist, she created the wonderful Kinny DeMarcus character who was the perfect snake to play this bit of nature-made-basketball off of. And I couldn't be happier with how it came out.

Thanks so much, P.