Basketball On The Internet.

HAD the pleasure yesterday of having lunch with new Basketball Australia CEO Anthony Moore, one of the stars of last week's Pete's Bar Lunch and a breath of hope for us long-suffering fans of the world's greatest game.

In town to meet with local basketball officials on a whirlwind stopover, we originally planned to have a coffee before he flew back to Melbourne and it spun into lunch.

Any true basketball fan would know why. (No you bastards. It's not because another cheap journo was angling for a free feed.)

It's because once you start talking basketball with another basketball person, the conversation takes on a life of its own.

There is so much that is great about where Australian basketball sits just at the moment.

We have a Magnificent Seven in the NBA and two reigning NBA champs in that cluster.

We have two WNBA champions and its championship coach, and our young Opals just came home with a Bronze Medal from the FIBA Worlds.

Yes, getting that message out and no longer acting as if our sport is some mainstream pauper was high on the agenda.

That's after Moore modestly revealed he was the least interesting speaker at Pete's Bar Lunch, way behind Calvin Bruton and Brendan Joyce for entertainment value.

(So that makes two years in succession the BA CEO has been the least interesting speaker).

But he did feel "the love in the room" because Pete's Bar Lunch is one of the far-too-few annual social events where real basketball people meet and it is a celebration of our game's past glories.

Of course, those same diehards often also quietly lament the fact our game isn't where it should be on the grand stage, but that is between reminiscing great memories while forever retaining the ever-present hope for the future.

Australians in US colleges, the future of the WNBL, where state leagues should fit in a grander national picture, junior championships, elite pathways, Aussie university involvements in pro and semi-pro programs, FIBA, the SEABL ... we covered a lot of territory - and that was even before the entree arrived.

Why am I telling you this?

To give you hope.

If you are here, reading this, then I believe you are a basketball person, a fan, a lover of the game, a hoops devotee at some level ... or maybe a teenage boy who thought B.O.T.I. stood for Boobs On The Internet.

Seriously, those of us who love this game and love this game in Australia, those with some sense of the game's history and those with none who just love it regardless, need to know we can embrace hope at last.

I have what I believe is the best compliment I can give Anthony Moore.

He is one of us.

I don't envy him the enormity and diversity of the challenges ahead.

But I have confidence he will give it his best shot. And that shot will be one for the highlight reels.