The challenge is to discuss the sport of squash without mentioning kissing. For me, the two are intertwined. Whenever I think of squash, I inevitably think of a blond Danish girl named Eva, and of my first kiss.

More of that significant milestone, shortly. First we must imagine a private school in England in the 1860s. It was here, in a yard at the elite Harrow School in London, that pupils occupied their spare hours by playing the old French sport of racquets.

The walls of the yard were disrupted with doors, windows, ledges and drainpipes, and the ground was uneven. In this unpredictable arena, the boys discovered that by puncturing the rubber ball, thereby slowing the pace of the ricochets, the game became more playable. They called the softer ball a “squash.”

In 1865, the new game — then dubbed “soft racquets” — moved into the indoor fives court. Fives was a handball sport that had evolved at Eton and Rugby; players used their gloved hands to hit a ball against the walls of a three-sided court. New rules were devised, and soft racquets became squash.

With the flag still flying high on the British Empire, many of Harrow’s alumni traveled to far-flung places and took squash with them, constructing dedicated courts at sports clubs in India, Africa and beyond.

And so it was, in 1975, two 8-yearolds were able to find seclusion in the squash court of Mombasa Sports Club on the coast of Kenya. We were classmates, and every Wednesday afternoon we came to the club for sports lessons. On one such day, as we sat on the clubhouse steps waiting to be collected, Eva passed me a note: “Would you like to kiss me?” I passed my response back: “Yes.”

We needed to find a place beyond the view of our prying friends. After stalking around the edge of the cricket field and loitering among trees on the far boundary, we simultaneously spotted the squash court.

A game was in progress. From outside we could hear the reverberation of ball on racket and wall, and the squeak of tennis shoes on the wooden floor. We tiptoed up to the empty spectator gallery. Below us, two men were locked in gladiatorial combat within the sweltering arena. They darted back and forth, alternately thwacking the ball against the wall. We sat on a bench. I held Eva’s hand. We closed our eyes and touched lips.

The magic of that moment was short-lived. As expatriate children, our fates were sealed. We moved with our families to other countries. I never saw her again.

Yet the memory of Eva has percolated every squash court I have ever played on. No matter how hard fought the game, no matter how thoroughly I am trounced, I find solace in that memory.

I have become familiar with the subtleties of the sport — how to gauge a squash ball’s properties by the color of its dot (a yellow-dotted ball bounces low, a blue-dotted ball bounces high), and how the ball must be warmed up before use.

I have enjoyed the satisfaction of bludgeoning the tiny sphere with a flick of the racket, and of hearing the distinctive smack of hollow rubber on concrete — and of seeing the smudge it leaves on the wall, much like the trace of a kiss.