Basketball offers an extremely rare gift: This game can serve as the ultimate fantasy realization tool by helping adults fulfill their childhood dreams.

Every seven year old on this earth with a ball in their hands imagines making it to the pros. For the most part, those visions include either a WNBA or NBA jersey. For the lucky few, they make it. They scale the mountain of success and their names are remembered for decades.

Unfortunately, that’s not how most of those childhood dreams end, though. The majority of those dreams bleed into nightmares and crash down into heartbreak.

The reality is that it’s nearly impossible to make the NBA and the WNBA, even for the best players on the planet. Roster spots are precious and American teams are ruthless. The best American college players go undrafted or get cut by the League year after year. Even seasoned vets lose their jobs to promising rookies. It’s an excruciating truth that is as certain as the sun setting in the west.

But just because the sun might be setting on their time hooping in the west, doesn’t mean they have to be consumed by darkness. These players often have a chance to rise as a star east of the States. Because in the same way that dreams can fracture into nightmares, nightmares can mend into dreams. And all of a sudden, the pain of not making it in America, pain enough to take the heart of even the most emotionally strong individual, begins to heal in Europe.

With the expansive travel comes expanded perspective. It’s not the end of basketball. In fact, it’s the beginning of a second life. Most importantly, a move to Europe opens up dreams that weren’t ever a thought to that kid growing up in the States. The mindset resets, forced to access new pathways to food, language, art and even basketball. The plays are different on offense and the coverages are different on defense and the fan interactions are more intense and the lifestyle can be even more decadent. Dreams that once took place at Madison Square Garden are shifted and finally actualized in Spain or Italy or Greece or France. The world stage.

Names that American fans might have forgotten are rewriting their destinies in the EuroLeague right now.

On the men’s side of current active rosters are people like Jabari Parker, Mike James, Trey Lyles, Shane Larkin, Talen Horton Tucker, Richaun Holmes, Evan Fournier, Mario Hezonja, Devonte’ Graham, Boogie Ellis, Brandon Boston Jr, Elijah Bryant, Dwayne Bacon, Armando Bacot, Justin Anderson, Carsen Edwards, Tyler Dorsey, Nick Calathes, Scottie Wilbekin, Lonnie Walker IV, Daniel Theis, Kendrick Nunn, Markquis Nowell, Frank Ntilikina, Monte Morris, Nico Mannion, Nikola Mirotic and the Hernangomez brothers.

There are a handful of highly recognizable WNBA faces playing in Europe right now, too. Kayla McBride, Jonquel Jones, Emma Meesseman, Gabby Williams, Marine Johannes, Jess Shepard, Julie Vanloo, Kennedy Burke, Julie Allemand, Leonie Fiebich, Stephanie Jones, Brionna Jones, Janelle Salaun and Bridget Carleton.

That’s just to name a few and that’s just in the EuroLeague alone. There are even more familiar faces furthering their childhood dreams in Asia and the Middle East and Australia.

It’s always gonna boil down to desire. Never a question of want, forever a motif of need. Hoopers that must hoop. There is no surrender in their hearts. All they know is the chase to the next shot, the next pass, the next steal, the next win. These players that go overseas carry just a little bit more with them. A little bit more struggle, a little bit more anguish, a little bit more knowledge and a few more scars. But to have scars is to be alive, both in reality and in dreams.