At the end of the cul de sac on Gooseberry Lane, there’s a basketball hoop. It’s a refuge, a listener and a teacher.

A few years back, the hoop’s adjustable lever broke during a storm. It’s held together with duct tape, but it’s sensitive. If the basketball doesn’t swish when it goes through the net, the hoop falls from its normal 10-foot height to six feet.

This is the basketball hoop where Amherst point guard Marcielo Aquino drilled his craft. He watched NBA games on YouTube, or the NBA App, and mimicked the moves.

As life around him fell apart, Aquino spent three hours a day in the summer heat practicing by himself on that hoop, with no shirt and his wired headphones swaying with each dribble.

“It became him and the basketball hoop and the trees,” his mother Evelin Aquino said. “The trees stood by him.”

Aquino’s path to being named the 2023-24 Daily Hampshire Gazette Boys Basketball Player of the Year was not a straight line.

Aquino left Amherst and he came back. Then he left and came back again. Through it all, he learned about himself. He learned about his own mental health. And he learned how much he valued the Amherst community.

“He learned some major lessons,” Evelin said. “Community is important. Being around people that inspire you is important. And the value that he had for this community, both youths and adults, and really, the value and the importance of that in your well-being, he really learned that.”

Family and coaches say Aquino is a role model at Amherst-Pelham Regional High School. At Amherst Recreation, he was the youngest camp counselor at last year’s summer camp. Reynaud Harp, longtime Northampton boys basketball coach and the Director of Amherst Recreation, said that he sought out Aquino to be a “positive beacon” to the younger campers. When he offered Aquino the job, he could immediately see the reverence in his campers’ faces as they saw the pair talking.

Aquino has a handshake with every camper. He still has art from them taped to the walls of his bedroom.

It’s all part of a relationship with the Amherst community that’s been developed over 18 years.

Aquino started becoming serious about basketball toward the end of his years at Wildwood Elementary and reached the Amherst varsity team as a freshman. He played sparingly, but showed promise.

Then, his life took its first turn.

Convinced by his then-step dad and Putnam coach Lou Roe that he needed a fresh start, Aquino left Amherst to play his sophomore season at Putnam. It was an adjustment.

“(It wasn’t like) the support system I have here,” Aquino said. “I feel like that was really important because I had never been away from that.”

Every day, he woke up at 5 a.m. and didn’t get home until 10 p.m. Putnam was twice as big as the Amherst schools he had grown up in. He liked social studies and writing poetry, but Putnam is a vocational school, so he took up construction.

This was all in the midst of COVID-19, which left Aquino isolated from his old friends from Amherst. He struggled to adapt to the new environment.

“Going through regular school sometimes, I was like ‘man, I wish I was back at Amherst, back at home,’” Aquino said.

The only thing keeping him hopeful was the start of basketball season. He was excited to see how he’d play under the tutelage of Roe and against Springfield competition.

But instead of a dream, it was a nightmare.

Putnam lost the first game of the season to Central by 55 points and then proceeded to start the year 0-9. Aquino felt like he was supposed to lead the team, but he was only a sophomore. He says now that he simply wasn’t ready for that level of responsibility.

Late in the season, Putnam lost to Amherst by double digits and Aquino suffered a season-ending back injury.

He was burnt out and depressed. As soon as the season was over, he transferred back to Amherst.

“I saw him shrinking,” Evelin said. “There’s points where you have to detour. You don’t have to fall off a cliff to know that’s not the way to go.”

Aquino came back to Amherst in the spring of his sophomore year. He seamlessly transitioned back into his community – “it was like the lights got brighter,” he said.

But problems at home intensified. Roe and Evelin were in the process of getting a divorce, and his relationship with Roe also deteriorated. The conflict pushed Aquino to distract himself by diving deeper into basketball, and he practiced on the hoop in the cul de sac for hours. He rode his bike to Mount Sugarloaf. He committed himself to earning a college basketball scholarship.

Aquino went into Amherst games that year angry and took his feelings out on the court. He felt like he had always been in someone else’s shadow, and spent the year trying to make a reputation for himself.

That spring, he received a scholarship offer from The MacDuffie School in Granby to play NEPSAC basketball the following year. He debated whether or not to leave Amherst for the second time.

He ultimately decided to transfer and reclassify down a year, figuring that the increased exposure of playing at a prep school would push him closer to his goal of a college scholarship.

Like at Putnam, Aquino often woke up before dawn and arrived home late at night. He shared the family’s car with Evelin. But the commute between his house and MacDuffie and the expenses associated with the school were draining him financially.

“It was wearing on him,” Evelin said. “This balancing act of looking out for our family and not feeling like he’s the most important one.”

Midway through the fall and in the heat of open gym season, Aquino was knocked unconscious from an elbow to the nose. He was out for two weeks with a concussion, and when he returned, he was out for another week with the flu.

He fell from a spot with consistent playing time to last man on the roster.

He was burning out again.

“There was no way I would be able to have a job and basketball and school,” Aquino said. “I would probably lose myself in that equation. I did just want to focus on my mental health because there’s no way I was going to drive myself into the ground for no reason.”

He had worked tirelessly for the MacDuffie scholarship. Finally, it seemed like his hard work was paying off toward his ultimate goal of earning that college scholarship. But transplanted again, life was difficult. It was getting “harder than hard,” Evelin said.

Aquino handed over his full ride at MacDuffie, gave up his dreams of a college scholarship and returned the car to his mom full-time. He transferred back to Amherst at the end of the first quarter and reclassified back to his original grade.

Again, he was received warmly back in his community.

“It was seamless,” Harp said. “His community, coaches, teammates, they all embraced him. I know enough examples to the contrary… there was nothing awkward about that.”

Amherst head coach Jamahl Jackson was relieved. He said he didn’t know what the Hurricanes would have done without their point guard, their leader.

Coming off weeks of rigorous prep school practice, Aquino still got morning workouts in on the Amherst basketball court before school started. But with his goal of a college scholarship no longer in reach, he could feel his dedication to the sport slip away.

“I felt myself burning out,” Aquino said. “So I was like, ‘let me just have fun and go to practice and enjoy myself.’ It’s my last season in high school, I might as well enjoy it. And then that’s what it blossomed into.”

Aquino led the 2023-24 Hurricanes in scoring and assists and always guarded the opposing team’s best player. Though Amherst lost tight games in both the Western Mass. and state tournaments, Aquino said he had the most fun playing basketball of any year in his career. He will attend UMass next year.

“He valued a lot of other things in his life,” Evelin said. “And I think his senior year just really put it in perspective. [He realized] I enjoy playing basketball but I’m not sure I need it to live.”

As his passion for basketball dissipated, Aquino spent more time with his family and friends and expanded on interests he couldn’t focus on in previous years. The goal of a college scholarship had been so singular that he had never taken a step back.

“I feel like that’s where a lot of hoopers get that misconception,” Aquino said. “And I had that for a long time, too. I gotta work hard, I gotta make it. But I wasn’t really enjoying myself. I was blinded by working to make it, not working for myself.”

He unfollowed the high school basketball mixtape accounts on Instagram. And as he works out in the company of other students in the gym at the high school, he tells them his story. You might not be like the players online doing between-the-legs dunks at showcases, but you can still make it, he says. Put the work in and keep your mind set on the right goals.

It’s not impossible, because I did it, he says.

“I’m still struggling with the question: who am I when I’m not distracted?” Aquino said. “But at the same time, I’m slowly figuring it out.”