At 9:14am on a warm breezeless beautiful spring-turning-into-summer morning north of Boston, I stood on the 8th hole tee box focused on the pin sitting in the middle of the elevated green which I had just lasered to be 134 yards away. My confident seven iron in hand, I made great contact with my white high-number (#8) Titleist ProV1x ball after following my pre-shot routine that I'd been working diligently to refine recently. The green in the distance responded 3 seconds later with a 'crack' that ripped through the air signaling that my ball had struck the pin with some force. Although chances heavily favored my ball ultimately perched on the green yards away (or even off completely) the unfortunate result of randomness and physics typical of my game. The fact that no one saw any ricocheting ball images emerge from our tee box below, however, gave me just a whisper of hope that something special may have happened. Ten seconds later that hopeful whisper became a declarative shout as two golfers suddenly appeared running up to the pin from the second tee box confirming the hole-in-one event that had just happened. As I approached and retrieved my ball from the hole, it appears my ball flew DIRECTLY into the hole, hitting the pin without striking any part of the green other than the bit of green at the edge of the cup which got dented and deformed - in other words a slam-dunk!