FanPost

Right When This City Needed It Most

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You see them all across town. They're on torsos in shopping malls in Grapevine and at gyms in Addison, waiting outside the Angelika and in bars on McKinney Avenue. They're royal blue. Nondescript, just like any other blue t-shirt. That is, until you get close enough to see the inscription emblazoned in white. You see two words : The Time. As your eyes run rightward, there's a logo. It's a beautiful logo. You've seen it many times before and it makes you feel good. Then you see two more words: Is Now. And as it all comes together in your mind in a matter of nanoseconds as your synapses fire and your neurons make the connection, you realize it's both pretty true and pretty false. Because, on the evening of June 12th, we got to see the culmination of something that was both near-impossible, bound not to happen, and simultaneously had to happen right then. We got to see the Mavericks win it all.


This year wasn't their time. They had their time in 2006. They had it in a barnburner overtime Game 7 four hours south of here on I-35. They had it after six games against the MVP that got away to Phoenix. And they had it on the beach up 2-0 against Miami, with twelve minutes left in Game 3. And they let it get away. They again had it when they won 67 games the following year. They had it yearly from October until April, at which point all they had was heartbreak.

And after all these crushing heartbreaks, they didn't have any more time. The media had written them off. A lost cause, a last ditch effort by a group of perennial almost-rans destined to fall short one more time. It was all gone. Their time wasn't now. The reaper had come, Father Time had put his foot down, and the hourglass was spent. The sand had all reached the bottom for Dirk and his misfits.


Up until April 23rd, that is. Enter stage left, our friend Brandon Roy. He played the game of his life with four knees less than you and I combined, and brought the Blazers back from 23 down to tie the series in front of a raucous Rose Garden crowd. He shook the Mavericks' foundation. Everything was coming back, those same old soft Mavs crumbling again, right? It felt like it. That rumble slid through the tectonic plates from Oregon all the way back to our beloved Victory Park and rattled the table on which that aforementioned Mavericks' hourglass rested.


And in the process, he unwittingly knocked a few last, unexpected, straggling grains of sand loose. A grain falls to the bottom: Tyson Chandler has thirteen offensive rebounds and abuses the Blazers front line in a must-win Game 5. Another grain falls: Kobe Bryant loses the ball with Game 1 on the line and seconds left on the clock. Another grain: Kevin Durant hoists his imaginary championship belt, James Harden inexplicably fouls out, and Dallas plays five minutes of transcendental basketball to engineer a stunning comeback for the ages. Another: Dirk gets his eternal NBA Finals montage moment by spinning and laying in a game-winner with his busted left middle finger. And the bonafide last grain falls: Shawn Marion dribbles out the final seconds in a clinching sixth game at Goliath's house on the beach.


It wasn't supposed to be this way. Their time it wasn't, remember? Yet, on the other end of that coin, with every miraculous comeback, we watched unhappenable things happen. Again and again, until it almost had to be, until these miracle workers had us thinking "Maybe the time is now." The timing couldn't've been better.



Because years of great regular-season success followed by terrible playoff heartbreak had jaded the people of Dallas. One more first-round exit could've jeopardized that AAC sellout streak, could've caused us to lose all hope in our basketball savior Dirk, could've made us trade the Jet away, could've driven Cuban to dull the pain with his very own baseball team. And right when the relationship between the fans and the team, the city and our Mavericks, was more tenuous and hesitant than it'd ever been, when we'd been crushed more times than ever, and when we wanted it more badly than ever before, they broke through. They put the city's hopes on their backs and did everything that had to happen when it wasn't supposed to happen. And now we're tiny little electrons orbiting something so very glorious: A win for the good guys. Our guys. When we weren't supposed to get it. But when we needed it most.


Admittedly, since June 12th, most things in our fair city are still the same. It's still sweltering. Traffic on 635 is still terrible. Campisi's still makes the best pizza in the city. But there are some differences, and it's not just the blue shirts. All that basketball-related doubt and hurt and disappointment, it's gone. People seem to be a little bit happier. They no longer have reason to be cautious and guarded in expressing their fandom, because they finally know what it's like to get what you hoped for. And as this is the first championship I've had the pleasure of witnessing, I suppose that's just what happens when there's a little sand left in the top of the hourglass. When impossible loses its prefix and the tides turn in your city's favor, if just for once. Enjoy it, Dallas. Because now we spend our days in the city of champions.

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via cdn0.sbnation.com


Hope you liked it! You can find me spitting more uneducated sports musings at http://twitter.com/garrettkingsays.

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