One of the worst things about getting old is losing your hair color to the march of grey that overtakes your once vibrant mane. I have begun to succumb to this unavoidable process, with the odometer clicking yet again a few days ago. Today, in the mirror, the worst part of going grey stared back at me. They grow like unruly weeds compared to the rest of my hair and jet out as if they are trying to gain the attention of every stranger who glances at me. I am sure they succeed more than I am aware of.
For every bummer, some positives come with aging out of your prime and into (gasp) the middle of middle-aged. One of the most important is perspective. I am young enough to have embraced technology throughout adulthood but old enough to remember using a rotary phone as a child. Talking about an event like the NBA Finals used to happen between small pockets of friends at school, at work, or between shots at the bowling alley. Now, the way we talk about sports has warped how we think about sports.
The democratization of the proverbial microphone means everyone with an internet connection can have a voice on topics they are passionate about. At first blush, this sounds like progress, and admittedly, some good has come from the barriers to entry into media being lowered. Yet as it turns out, the gatekeepers to the meritocracy were serving a purpose all those years. They had an ear for talent and only had a handful of competitors. Their decades of effort in safeguarding their precious messaging bandwidth for those with something to say worth reading or listening to turned out to matter more than we realized. These days it is more than just sports coverage fanning out in all directions away from the ivory towers of legacy media – the old guard has adapted to survive. Who gets more listens, Pat McAfee or Zach Lowe? It is easier to flock to the lower common denominator of discourse and the bean counters know it.
Proponents of new media will say that the audience should be the final arbiter on who is worth their time. Even though this is how it plays out every day, what is the cost? When the rise and fall of a YouTube channel or podcast is powered by – and often hinges on – feeding the outrage monster in your audience’s brain, content creators will follow that same yellow brick road that seems to work for so many others. This is why nearly every talking head segment is rooted in conflict as producers comb through the topics of the day and find a way to drive a wedge between their on-air talent to create faux tension. New media or legacy, it is (almost) all the same now. The battle for your eyeballs, time, and loyalty the next day is fought and won on a battlefield that has muddled our perception of what it means to love sports. Add to that the institutional memory that comes with expressing your opinions on social media and the backlash that comes with being wrong – and you have a recipe for nonstop hyperbole and groupthink.
Too many of us are ready to declare a best of 7 series over at 2-0 and certainly 3-0. History says that it is, but history is also being written every season and eventually, a team will come back from 3-0. Trailing the Boston Celtics 3 games to 1, perhaps that team will be this year’s Dallas Mavericks – or perhaps the season ends tonight. The truth is we don’t know and that is why we love sports. The human drama playing out right before our eyes where even the players are blind to the outcome until a game unfolds. Why is this kernel of immutable truth around the spellbinding nature of a live event playing out in real-time lost in all the chatter? Far too many of us seek kneejerk certainty, ready to pronounce something as over when the story may just be taking a fateful turn.
In the days before Twitter or X, before social media and countless talking head shows, the context of that 3-0 hole said that the Boston Red Sox were doomed in the 2004 ALCS. A stolen base from Dave Roberts, a bloop single from David Ortiz, a bloody sock, and a game-seven slam from Johnny Damon – suddenly Boston was celebrating a miracle. If you watched that series live, you know there were countless moments where the Red Sox’s fate hung on a single play, a single call, or a single pitch. Twenty years later they are simply remembered as the team that did the impossible.
It takes outlandish, irrational hope to believe the Dallas Mavericks can come back in these Finals and make history. If you want to say things will end tonight, you can list dozens of valid reasons. Here are three reasons why – if you choose to believe there will be a Game 6 – you are not crazy nor alone.
First, the Mavericks are getting better under the surface in this series. Game 1 was a laugher, Game 2 was within single digits fairly late in the game, and Game 3 was a single-possession contest late in the fourth quarter – then the dam broke in Game 4. Second, the chatter about Porzingis being available in certain circumstances is a transparent bit of gamesmanship. Playing the sharpshooting big man in this series risks his ability to play for part or all of next season and his lack of movement late in Game 2 suggests he might not be more than a spot-up shooter on one end and a very tall traffic cone on the other. Finally, the Mavericks now have four games of Finals experience under their belt and players like Dereck Lively II, PJ Washington, and others look far more comfortable.
Fully embracing fandom means believing something miraculous is possible and then being disappointed more often than not when the odds are against you. On those rare occasions in your sports-viewing life when miracles do happen, your faith and belief can be rewarded with memories that stay with you for the rest of your life. The joy that Dallas fans felt after Game 2 in the 2011 NBA Finals did not swell up in us because we knew it was going to happen down 15 points with under six minutes to go – but because we believed it could.
That is why we watch. The rest is just noise. It is ok – more than that – it is justified to believe. Not because it will happen, but because it could. That is reason enough to watch with an open mind that something epic might unfold later tonight and bring us one more game in this series. I’ll be tuning in with you, right after I order some hair color for these pesky grays.