Victor Wembanyama reached a double-double on Monday night — 10 points and 10 rebounds — in 8 minutes and 31 seconds of game time. This is the third-fastest double-double in the NBA since the 1997-98 season, according to league tracking data. He finished the game with 41 points and 16 rebounds on 17-of-27 shooting. The Spurs beat the Bulls 129-114. I attended the game. I have been thinking about it for approximately fifteen hours, and I am no closer to a framework that adequately accounts for what I saw.

I want to be precise about the 8 minutes and 31 seconds. A basketball game contains 48 minutes. In the time it takes to drive from Hyde Park to the Loop on a good traffic day — from the moment you pull out of the garage to the moment you arrive at your destination — this man can reach a statistical threshold that most players in the history of the sport do not reach in an entire game. I understand that basketball statistics have a denominator problem, that pace and pace era and lineup and context all matter, that numbers are always an incomplete description of an event. I understand all of this. I also watched it happen, in real time, from row 14, and I am telling you that the understanding did not make it feel less strange.

There is a concept in environmental philosophy — which is the field I abandoned, partly but not entirely because it did not provide adequate tools for watching NBA basketball — called “category error.” It describes the mistake of applying one conceptual framework to something that belongs to a different one. When you say “the number seven is green,” you are not making a false claim; you are making a claim that has no truth value at all, because color and number inhabit different categories of description. I kept returning to this while watching Wembanyama take his 27th shot attempt. There is a category called “basketball player,” and there are the attributes we associate with that category — height, athleticism, skill, basketball intelligence — and Wembanyama has all of those, measurably, by margin. But watching him operate in the actual game felt less like watching an exceptional member of a category and more like watching a description of the category itself, embodied, playing basketball against the people who play basketball.

He is seven feet four inches tall and he moves like a point guard. His wingspan — the distance from fingertip to fingertip — exceeds the height of a standard doorway. He blocked a shot in the first quarter that, to the eye, appeared to be in a completely different vertical plane than the one he was occupying, which is not physically possible and yet occurred. I was there. The play has been reviewed on video. It occurred. The Chicago Bulls had three players score 20 or more points on Monday night — 23, 21, and 20 — and lost by 15. This is because the Spurs also had Wembanyama, and Wembanyama is currently having a season in which he has 14 games with 30 or more points, which is a pace that puts him in company with players whose names you would know from highlight reels that predate this conversation.

Tre Jones, the Bulls guard who went 0-for-the-trade that sent him from Sacramento to Chicago, had 23 points in his return to San Antonio, where he played last season. He played well. He was a professional athlete performing at a high level. The arena was aware of his return, in the way that arenas are aware of these narrative moments. And then Wembanyama caught an alley-oop and threw it down with a force that suggested he finds the concept of the rim personally offensive, and the arena shifted its awareness to something else. This is what it is to play basketball in the same building as this person. You are the story until you are not the story, and you are not the story for very long.

I have covered weather for seven years. I have written about lake-effect snow and polar vortexes and the particular silence of a city after two feet of accumulation, about the way extreme natural phenomena produce a kind of enforced humility in the people who encounter them. I did not expect to feel something similar watching a basketball game in March. I was wrong about that. The final score was 129-114. The Bulls remain 29-46. The draft lottery is May 12. None of this is what I am thinking about.