The Fair Jessica has a piece in The Weekly Standard on Sarah Palin, Alaska and basketball. The opening:

Al I ever really needed to know I learned on the basketball court.” That’s Sarah Palin, circa 2004, when she was merely, as the Obama campaign would say, “the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience.” More than once on her way to becoming a national political phenom as John McCain’s running mate, Palin has said she owes it all to playing hoops. But she’s not just talking about basketball. She’s talking about girls’ basketball. In Alaska. In the seventies. It was a time and a place before identity politics. Before feminists made young female athletes the bright, shiny faces of their graying crusade; before Nike cut treacly, black and white commercials featuring sweaty and empowered young women; and before the law mandated that all six-year-old girls, regardless of race, color, creed, or total lack of interest, strap on shin guards and spend each and every Saturday kicking around a #3 soccer ball. I know because I was there. While Sarah Palin was calling plays as point guard for the Wasilla Warriors, I was posting low as center for the West Valley Wolfpack, just a few hundred miles north in Fairbanks. It was a different world. We didn’t play basketball to pad our college applications or fulfill some bureaucrat’s notion of “gender equity.” We played because the winters were long and cold and dark. There was nothing else to do. Maybe as a result, basketball was deadly serious business.