Week after week. Weekend after weekend.

SALT LAKE CITY -- Shaka Browne and Lytel Martin had the exact same routine growing up. They'd go to school. They would come home. They'd pop-in NBA 2K9 -- the 2009 variant of this NBA-based video game -- and would ball online. Five-on-five virtual games. OnMT 2K21 the weekends, same thing. Perform all weekend. Rack up stats. Bucket after bucket. Sometimes they'd work 9 to 5. Come home, log into NBA 2K and game. Again and again. Day daily. Week after week. Weekend after weekend.

Browne (who goes by"Shaka") and Martin (who goes by"Lotty") climbed the worldwide rankings of their NBA 2K9 online community. It turned out to be a competitive period with countless thousands competing on the web. Shaka, whose speech was"YoungSparks92," watched someone climbing the ranks with him. "YoungKobe3." Both New Yorkers were linked together then. Little did they know that almost a decade later they'd be teammates, competing side by side for the Utah Jazz in a professional league for NBA 2K players.

See, in the time, it was all about positions. They climbed up the ladder. They jockeyed for position. Shaka had the bragging rights -- always ahead of Lotty. When Lotty found out both NBA 2K stars climbed up in the Exact Same neighborhood of Mount Vernon, New York. He knew he needed to fight him. One match to pick bragging rights to the town and 2K. They went to different high schools, so it wasn't like they could join on their own. However they had mutual friends, so the match was set up.

Shaka wanted the opportunity to play with Lotty one . He knew he was a much better player than him, even though they had been constantly neck-and-neck at the competitive positions. He simply wanted the moment to prove it. They played a hard-fought game.

Later that night, the two competitors -- that had never met until that point -- ended up going into the movies. Fast forward more than 10 years and both are still side by side, teaming together on Jazz Gambling, the Utah Jazz affiliate for the NBA 2K League. "When we found out that we were from precisely the exact same neighborhood and we were on top ofCheap NBA 2K Coins the planet, like, wow, that's crazy we need to start hanging out and talking about the sport to kind of learn from each other," Shaka said. "And we only became teammates then."