For a long time I have wanted to enter a professional sports draft.

I have played a lot of sports in my life and consider myself to be pretty athletic, but I definitely don’t have the ability to be legitimately selected by any self-respecting team.

My hope was that once in the draft, some team would get lazy and just look at a list of names and say, “What the heck, let’s take this Hannas kid.”

Last fall, I put this plan into motion. I emailed each of the major U.S. sports leagues (NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL) and asked how to enter their respective drafts.

I only heard back from the NBA, which responded the next day. They asked me to send my answers to certain questions about my background to this person at their league office in New York. So, in September, I did just that.

As the months passed, I assumed they had either misplaced my letter or, more likely, figured out that I had no business being in their draft. I had even started to formulate some theories about who may have sent them a tape of my miserable shooting performance on the court behind our house.

But yesterday I opened the mailbox to find among credit card applications and a Netflix movie a letter from the NBA. It’s been a long time since I’ve been so excited to open a piece of mail. Here’s what they said:

At first I thought they were wrong about my lack of collegiate eligibility. I played exactly zero combined years at Susquehanna University and the University of Maryland, and thus thought I was still NCAA eligible. I even carefully worded my response to the NBA question about where I had played, saying explicitly only that I had “attended” those schools.

But after further research, it turns out the rule is you have five years from the time you first enroll at a college or university in which to use up your eligibility.

While I was hoping to get invited to the draft in New York in June — and yes, I would have gone — it’s nice to know I don’t have to wait that long to chase my NBA dreams.

Surely some team needs a newly eligible free agent to help finish out their season.