What now? What cold? We played basketball with PPC in the frozen Vytina

Saturday evening, November 25th. Vytina location. Temperature, somewhere around zero, a little above, a little below. Very cold, very windy, great weather if you’re in a warm place. The Sportish trip went better and better, the rafting in Lousios exhausted us, but the cosiness, the company of the 16 readers and the food were enough to fill our souls until we fell asleep.

We’ve been looking forward to Sunday morning since Saturday evening. So much so because we wanted to play basketball at Vytina’s school, play Jordan and Antetokounmpo (okay, we’re not getting the point). We wanted the competition, we wanted to beat our neighbor and our opponent. But we also saw the weather reports and knew that it was possible to wake up to a white landscape. Even though it rained a lot. Even if the wind was wild.

And indeed the landscape was magical at first light. The snow had created a special atmosphere, but it had also unsettled most of us who wanted to play basketball. The blue and white jerseys with the PPC logo They had been laid on the sofa in the evening and they too were ready to fight.

Pantelis Vlachopoulos was the only one who wasn’t stressed. “We’re definitely going to play basketball,” he said. We also looked at him a little scared, a little confused, while the snow continued to fall thickly in beautiful Vytina. But since the weather conditions in the Greek mountains are changeable, we hoped that the sun would do us a favor at some point. And he did it to us. And we ran into the field!

We put on our jerseys and shorts, got our balls, celebrated when we saw a net in one of the basketballs, and started shooting.

The net remained intact for a while (you can understand why, let’s not tell everything, let’s not take our eyes off), we did stretching exercises to warm up, it wasn’t easy but we wanted to play so much that between us, how cold and what kind of snow?

As if we were children again. As if we had returned to those years when we didn’t understand the weather, the rain, the heat waves. We just wanted to shoot. And that’s exactly what we did.

With free-throw contests, with tension, with trash-talking, all that was missing was the planned 3-on-3 game, because suddenly the sky darkened and the snow returned, turning the ground into… an ice rink.

PPC has been alongside us to support this effort. And at the end of the day, even if the program didn’t go as we had imagined, even if we didn’t break a sweat, we were satisfied with the shots we took in a winter landscape.