Euroleague Playoffs 2024 - No sleep till Berlin

If you have watched basketball long enough, you know there is an ebb and flow to the game. And things go where it looks like they are going, most of the time… It was one of those nights… İbrahim Kutluay called it early, as Fenerbahçe drained one improbable three after another to barely hang on to the game. We are gonna take the lead at just the right time, and will win this one he said. So we did.

But if you were a physically and emotionally drained fan, who felt out of her habitat on the living room couch, it was a miserable game to watch for a long stretch. A lot of things were not happening, for so long… But the team refused to go away. Again, and again and again… And the feeling that made itself known sometime in the fourth, ignored by an instinct of self preservation and for fear of jinxing it, was eventually too loud and bold to deny… At around the 2 min mark in OT…. That is when the house went arena crazy.

There was another moment of clarity some time in the second half. The realisation that we were going to go as far as the captain took us. And I was at peace with that. As things turned out, this was the main epiphany of the game. Nobody who watches those two possessions out of the context of the game, or the season, will fully grasp their meaning. The team won. And it was a beauty…

And yes, I am getting the jersey…

How you lose reveals a lot about you as a person. You can go into full denial mode, demeaning what you have lost, demeaning yourself in the process and burning a few bridges along the way. Or, you own up to it. The moment of vulnerability from Mike James at the end of the game was a show of great humility, strength and respect, from one of the greats of the game.