Kwintin Williams Is Dunking in Ways No One Even Imagined Before

You've never seen the cock-back-360-windmill before — Overtime (@overtime)April 7, 2017

It is maybe a stretch to say that the universe is improving, but it is expanding. It is, NASA scientists determined in 2016, expanding even faster than anyone expected, although some 95 percent of this large and growing universe consists of things that emit no light and so cannot be observed—dark energy, dark matter, dark radiation. Just because we cannot see these things does not mean that they don't exist; we can imagine them, even if we can't quite clap eyes on them. Anyway, you have probably watched the dunk embedded above this by now.

The person dunking the basketball is named Kwintin Williams, and he's from Alaska. He has played at Pima County Community College in Arizona each of the last two years after academic issues coming out of high school, and you will probably not be surprised to learn that he is being recruited widely, and already has offers in hand from Texas Christian and UNLV and Washington State. He will almost certainly receive more. You already know why, but here is another reason:

I'm up right now ! — Kwintin Williams (@JUMPMANEBIG)March 31, 2016

I haven't seen Kwintin Williams play basketball outside of some slow-mo dunks in empty gyms and some YouTube footage in only slightly less empty gyms. I've seen his JUCO stats and know what the numbers mean, but have no real useful frame for contextualizing them. I wish him well, because his dunks are good as hell and because I wish everyone well. But I think it is also appropriate to thank Kwintin Williams.

Agree or Disagree: Better than any dunk from the 2017 NBA Dunk Contest.
via — Ballislife.com (@Ballislife)April 6, 2017

The universe expands without any concern for us, and hides from us things that we will probably never see; our role in all this is negligible, and we barely even know how to watch what's happening, let alone comprehend it. But it is important to believe, even if we cannot understand, that the limits of human possibility can expand, as well—that we can see and do and experience things heretofore unknown, that there are new dunks being done that we have not seen, and new dunks to be done after that, that possibilities lie over the horizon that are unlike those we have previously known or currently even know how to imagine. Stop believing that, and you are lost.

So thank you, Kwintin Williams, for showing us that we are not finished. New dunks are possible. A new world is possible. There is no reason it could not be more beautiful and astonishing than what we've seen before.