First, that’s not Vince Carter’s jersey. When he won the dunk contest eighteen years ago and heat-blasted Michael Keaton’s face into a dazed gawp, he wasn’t sporting the quintessentially mid-nineties Raptors getup with chunky pinstripes and a cartoon dinosaur. Vince wore an unremarkable purple and black number with TORONTO on the front in a then-aggressively modern font. The Jurassic Park-inspired jersey is better, if only because it has a kind of charming garishness that most uniforms from the past two decades, designed to death and sleek to the point of insipidness, don’t possess. But it’s not what Vince was wearing.

Perhaps Donovan Mitchell’s recall is faulty, or he wanted to look cool. (In which case he shouldn’t have tucked the thing into his tequila sunrise Jazz shorts.) At any rate, the dunk—a reverse three-sixty windmill from the left block—was mistranslated too: impressively athletic but lacking the violence that made the original special. In the memory, Vince got eye-level with the top of the backboard and struck the rim so hard it emitted a death-yawp. Video basically confirms this. The cutaway gallery of gleeful, astounded, and delightfully disgusted reactions from the TNT broadcast confirm that something seismically awesome has happened. 

Donovan underwhelmingly executed what Vince owned. He leapt and spun and the ball went through the hoop, but standing six-foot-three, he couldn’t put the necessary oomph behind his delivery and the result was more acrobatic than exciting. He gave his take on a master’s work and came up wanting. He Gus Van Sant’d it. 

Bear with me, for a minute. Last summer, Jeb Lund wrote a cruel but sympathetic critique of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, the Spielberg-adapted bestseller in which some kids bleep and bloop through a virtual reality videogame constructed by That Dude Who Just Will Not Get Over Back To The Future. (I read it a while back—in grad school, strangely enough. It did not compare well with D.H. Lawrence.) Lund’s piece reckons with the implications of calorie-free consumption and what nostalgia won’t fix, and it concludes with a devastating claim: maybe the cold message of becoming a pop culture savant is realizing that you’ve dedicated your life to the craft of memorizing how it happened to someone else—or as someone else happened to imagine it.

This isn’t a convincing argument against, like, watching Die Hard for the fifteenth time, because you should do what makes you happy, but it does effectively describe the inner emptiness that motivates that sort of activity. When you remove the DVD from your shelf, you’re choosing to hide from your own consciousness for two hours and twelve minutes in the confines of a familiar fiction, which is to say you’re enjoying yourself, but you’re not growing or learning or helping others. This is fine—I’m going to get drunk after I finish writing this; that’s my emotional easy chair—but building a life out of it is pretty pathetic. Ready Player One has to do a lot of work to create a universe in which that Die Hard rewatch is anything more than a selfish, pleasurable waste of time. Hilariously, the book posits it as the most important thing anyone has ever done. 

So: Donovan Mitchell’s dunk that wasn’t his. He’s twenty-one, which means he didn’t watch Vince Carter perform in the 2000 Dunk Contest. He caught Vinsanity secondhand, through stories passed down from his elders—or, more probably, YouTube compilations. Events from the past take on an ineffable immortality that they don’t have in the moment, perhaps especially when you didn’t experience them yourself. It’s the difference between watching a new release versus a revival house screening of The Graduate, the difference between circa 1968 hippies and the ones who now walk the earth attempting to reflect a zeitgeist they don’t really know. This is a fussy way of saying stuff changes over time but also stays stuck in it. You can’t throw on Thriller and transport yourself back to 1982. You can’t cover Thriller, even note-for-note, and truly contemporize it. 

And you can’t do Vince’s dunk, not just due to of its difficulty, but because Vince already did it and so it can never quite be done again. Nothing hits harder than pure invention: the moment something happens for the first time and there’s a great sudden crackling in the mind, like rushing carbonation. There’s no recreating that, only recycling or nodding at it. Mitchell’s interpretation was meh, but his imagination let him down before he stepped onto the court. 

Of course, his intentions were benign. He likes the dunk a lot and he thought it would be neat to stage a tribute. And while that’s fine, it’s also a discouraging admission of failure, especially because Mitchell isn’t, like you or I, some clumsy dweeb dumbstruck by Vince Carter’s ability to do things we can’t. If you’re an aspiring comedy writer with some chops, you would hope that you can do better than Simpsons fan fic, and if you can soar like Mitchell, you should test the limits of your own peculiar abilities. You should create rather than reconfiguring what you already know. That’s the only way to move others in the way your favorite things move you—an escape from how it happened to someone else and a meeting, finally, with a self you can share with the world.