perfidy

I find that I am actually upset that I missed a professional basketball game. This is completely unprecedented in my experience, seeing as I am much more inclined to baseball, college football and obscure sports. I have always viewed pro basketball as a beauty show for thugs and retards. Amazingly, I still think that, but...

I watched the Cleveland Cavaliers, team of my hometown, defeat the Washington Wizards, team of my current home. It was fun, because I could go into work and ridicule my colleagues, remind them of the tactically foolish move of trading Hughes to the team that would knock them out of the playoffs. And seeing that Cavs win was just nice. Cleveland teams so rarely do.

But that playoff win threw them up against the juggernaut of the Detroit Pistons. It's hard for me to write a sentence that includes both "Juggernaut" and "Detroit" because (given my prediliction for baseball and football, and the current state of the city) Detroit is a byword for failure, incompetence and pathos. Nevertheless, it seems that Pistons have won every championship since Michael Jordan was abducted by aliens and replaced with a less than perfect clone. And the received wisdom was that the Cavs would be ground to itty-bitty pieces of red gristle.

And, in the first two games that is more or less what happened. So, I wrote off the Cavs and read Vernor Vinge's new book Rainbows End. (Very, very good, btw.)

Now I discover, to my horror, that the Cavs pulled unforseen victory out of their collective asses. They have won the last two games, even without one of their best players - Hughes, whose brother recently passed away. The series now stands at 2-2. And I missed the exciting comeback. I realize that this is mere prelude for eventual disappointment and heartbreak, but I will certainly be watching the rest of the playoffs.