Incidentally

One of my dad's favorite memories of watching basketball - and he's a lifelong basketball fan, much more so than any other sport - is of watching Game 5 of the 1976 NBA Finals, considered by many the greatest NBA game of all time. A triple overtime Finals game! And for him, of course, involving the Celtics. But the real value of the game for him is that my mother, who never cared about sports other than the occasional Olympic event and international soccer (rooting for Portugal and Brazil), was sort of waiting for the game to finish, and then became amazed that the game hadn't finished, and by the end was in rapt astonishment that both teams could just keep going, struggling on into the night, refusing to give up. In the end she was moved.

Now, the unhappy truth about sports is that most of the serious reasons sports fans would give you for loving sports and for the importance of watching sports (aside from trivial things like "because it's fun" and "it's a safe place for me to express irrationally tribal and xenophobic feelings") are usually not true. Most of the time sporting events aren't beautiful or inspiring or moving. But, as Bill Simmons wrote in one of his columns on the current Celtics-Bulls series, sports fans keep watching because you can never know when a transcendent moment will occur. You can't predict when greatness will reveal itself.

So. I was incredibly happy when the Celtics won the NBA Finals last year, and their series against the Lakers was a very good and exciting series, played by two teams that were very very good teams, near-great teams. But for all the reasons that people will write paeans to the transcendence of sport, that series doesn't exist in the same galaxy as this one. Neither team in this series is remotely as "good" a team as the ones that played in the 2008 NBA Finals. Neither team in this series is going to make this year's Finals. Whichever teams wins this series may well lose the conference semifinals and will certainly lose the conference finals. But: it is, as a basketball and a sports fan, one of the greatest, if not the greatest, sporting events I've ever seen in my life. It's thrilling, not simply because it's exciting but because I am thrilled, in my heart, to watch it. I have no idea what will happen tonight: perhaps it'll be a dull blowout, or perhaps one or both of these teams will finally remember what it's like to play badly. But right now two slightly-better-than-mediocre teams are playing at the absolute peak of their abilities, and bringing out the absolute best in each other, and it's beautiful. I can't promise that tonight's game will be nearly as good as the ones before it, but if you have any suspicion in your heart that you could enjoy watching a basketball game, I suggest you at least check out the fourth quarter to see what's going on.

Somebody wrote (I've read so much coverage of this series!) that in a way what makes it so compelling is laughably simple: both teams just keep making shots. In the end of a close game, somebody always misses a bunch of shots, but in this series both teams keep making shots until the final second. Which is to say: of course, basketball is just a game, and in this case a game played by wealthy men, for no stakes other than the ability to have pride for winning a game played by wealthy men before they go on to lose at the game to other wealthy men. But let's recognize that in that limited and trivial setting, there is no quit in these men. They are not giving up. They do not look at the score, and the time left, and hang their heads, and submit to what appears inevitable; they go out and do their work and set screens for Ray Allen and Ben Gordon to hit impossible shots. Absolutely impossible shots.

Dominance can be impressive: Russell and Chamberlain, Magic and Bird, Jordan, even the impressive defensive dominance of last year's championship Celtics team, the individual and at times invincible dominance of LeBron James. True dominance is a rare and therefore cherished quality for the sports fan to observe, but true dominance almost always prevents moments like this. If somebody someday asks me why sports could be worth watching, I'd cue up the fourth quarters and overtimes of games 1-3 and 4-6 of this stupid first-round basketball series and show them. Because I'm moved, and if I weren't so intentionally deadened to so much around me, I'd be inspired, because these silly men go out and play their silly game and will not lie down and say "enough". I'm, truly, awed.