The Side Part: Like banshees

The television starts to seizure when the Thunder run the way they did in games three and four. It gasps for air. Durant and Westbrook on the break, at home, running down the side of a mountain with spears in their hands and love in their hearts. It’s a singular experience. The sounds the fans make: trillions of helicopters in the room with me, trying to land. And this is through the speakers on my 32 inch Samsung.

I can’t imagine what it’s like inside the arena. It must be like that thing where you had turned up the radio very loud in your car the last time you drove it, and you’d forgotten that, and gotten back in, and turned on the car, and the sound was so loud it consumed you, and made you scramble for the dial. It must be like that, but bathed in neon, and the song playing is “B.O.B.”, and that’s the first time you heard it. No place gets to eleven like Oklahoma City in the playoffs. They brought in a choir of banshees and gave them megaphones.

This is a new thing, though. The Thunder have been very good for a while now, but they gave no indication that they were capable of this. This, this is another thing entirely. They showed flashes, playing GSW as close as they did during the regular season, but the full and beautiful game they have bestowed upon us, the viewing public, here and now is something akin to nirvana, or the basketball equivalent of Rosie Perez dancing to “Fight The Power” at the beginning of Do The Right Thing.

At some point during Game 4’s second quarter fireworks show the basketball fan collective let out an in unison WHAT ON EARTH IS GOING ON HERE? Watching the Dubs become mortal has left everyone questioning their religion, it seems. The powers that be have liked to wage a faux aesthetic war. The Warriors have beauty on their side, the Thunder have force. People like pretty things. They root for them. Yes, the Thunder were given some love, but not in the ways in which it matters. They would be built up, then buried. Before this series, and before the last, reading the previews would amount to a lot of:

This series will register a Heaven on the entertainment scale. Stars are everywhere. The games will be lovely. Watch them all so that you can tell your children about The New Golden Age Of The NBA. What we have here is two incredible teams capable of destruction. Westbrook and Durant vs. Curry and Green. Warriors in five.

All that to say, the cliché makes itself useful and available for the Thunder here. Nobody gave them a chance. People wanted to see Dubs-Spurs all year. The Thunder had better ideas. Even after they beat the Spurs, it was a foregone conclusion for the world that Steph Curry and Co. would meet LeBron and, this time, a healthy Cavs team. The Thunder are playing the spoilers. They have, thus far, thrown dirt on the abstract expressionist painting that is the Warriors offense, and have amazingly, somehow, done what everyone thought was impossible: been a better brand of entertainment. That’s maybe their greatest achievement thus far. For three out of the four games this series they have made the Warriors look boring. They’ve made millions of people stare with their mouth agape and say after their mind catches up to the carnage flickering in front of them, “I can’t believe what I’m seeing.”

The series is hardly over. That is the kind of fear that this GSW team strikes, despite being down 3-1, despite their energy having gone into hibernation over the last two games. They will not lay down, and Oracle will have its own kind of roar tonight. There is a world where they win three in a row. The Thunder have been through enough heartbreak these last three years, OKC fans would hardly be surprised by more. I find myself expecting the worst, typically, if only because every important person on the roster is made of flesh and bone and can therefore break. But that thinking feels like it has no place here. What has gone on in the series up till now is all we can speak intelligently on. The rest would be guesses, and those are tiring. There is one game that matters. Tonight’s. What we know is what has happened, and what has happened has been merry. The Thunder have been what the people wanted them to be for so long: devastatingly fun.