My childhood best friend was a boy named Sam. We met when we were 9 and discovered we had compatible imaginations that didn’t seem to match those of our peers.
We’d make up games. The rules were not consistent, and the points didn’t matter. Most of the games involved various reenactments of some prime-time television series geared toward adults, which we nonetheless watched.
We did pretend to be superheroes on the playground but not in the way of most of our contemporaries. This was the mid-1990s and the popular soap-adjacent series “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman” was airing on Sunday evenings. Instead of imagining we could fly, Sam and I would reenact dramatic dialogue-heavy scenes between Clark Kent and Lois Lane. (We always fought over whose turn it was to play Lois.)