NBA Finals: This is the end.

I always forget how emotional the end is.

My team (the Indiana Pacers) hasn’t been in the NBA Finals in more than a decade but over the course of the Finals I always find myself gravitating in the direction of one team, stumbling haphazardly into emotional investment. For at least the past three years, I have watched the final moments of the NBA season on my knees in front of the television, rocking back and forth involuntarily; for some reason the futon just feels too psychically restrictive.

I found my way to rooting for LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers this year because of sympathy for Kevin Love, Tristan Thompson, Kyrie Irving, et al. and the ways in which they have all been publicly flayed for supposed crimes against basketball, most of which had yet to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. But also because of my friends and their families. Fans of the Cavaliers seem to be strangely overrepresented among the writers and bloggers in my digital circle.

As I watched LeBron bend time and space to pin Andre Iguodala’s layup, Kyrie Irving summon the collective suffering of an entire city and channel it into one jumpshot, Kevin Love play the defensive possession of his life (which, honestly, felt like the most improbable of the three plays), I thought about my Cleveland friends watching this game with their fathers, mothers, wives, grandparents, or college roommates, some turning down the volume on their excitement so as not to wake the sleeping babies to whom they would someday try to describe this night and impart some measure of the emotional timbre.

Seeing the joy and relief and all the other emotions to base to even have a name, pouring out of LeBron and his teammates, imagining my friends and colleagues of the Cleveland diaspora doing the same in sports bars and living rooms or in the streets outside the Quicken Loans Arena, rocking on my knees on my own carpeted floor while my children slept in the other room, seems like a pretty good way to end the basketball season.

It felt fitting that Game 7 was played on Father’s Day. The narrative of this series was enveloped in regional tribalism, the kind of allegiances and psychological trauma that can accumulate within a family bloodline, often passed down from fathers to sons. Every Cavaliers fan was relieved of some sort of emotional burden last night, even those fans too young to understand what being a Cleveland sports fan used to mean.

Every player wearing a Cavaliers jersey was unburdened in a similar way. The most striking aspect, as Daniel Rowell wrote in The Rotation this morning, was how the game unfolded in a way that seemed to seek and destroy specific psychological scars. Love can’t defend to save his life, but he managed to save his team and their season. Irving’s shoot-first confidence is a weakness, but he made that shot and he made it a strength. LeBron can’t do what it takes to win the big one for Cleveland, until he did.

It’s almost too good to be true, almost inherently mythological — each hero fighting a representational battle against their actual (or perceived) personal flaws. With victory assured there is nothing left but to have their virtues extolled in legends that are passed down from generation to generation.

Game 7 will define the legacy of Cleveland sports for as long as human civilization continues to be interested in such things as regional sports legacies. Perhaps this is the turning point, a touchstone that sets off an extended period of greatness, a single moment when the winds of fate shifted and offered their full-throated support to the athletic organizations of Northeast Ohio. Or it could be that this is the apex, a vertical slash on the soon-to-be-growing timeline which marks the beginning of the next “Cleveland sports fans haven’t witnessed a major title in….”

Either way, I know that this game will be more than just a single moment for the Cleveland community. Whatever comes next — good, bad, working up a lather on the treadmill of mediocrity — what LeBron and his teammates have done will not just be a line in the digital database of Basketball-Reference. This win is a part of the cultural heritage of the Cleveland sports fan, even those children too young to realize it, even for those children who have yet to be born.

Can you imagine carrying the weight of that knowledge? And still being able to move your feet enough to stay in front of Stephen Curry for an eternity? Or lift yourself off the ground enough to make a three-pointer over the outstretched arms of a defender? Or, with that burden on your shoulders, having enough strength to chase down another professional athlete who has a huge head start, arriving in time to pin his layup to a glass backboard at a point 14-feet above the ground?

This coin has two sides. One man’s redemption is another man’s bondage.

The Warriors have been made unfortunate prisoners of their own failure. The lead the lost and the way the lost it will be lorded over their heads for an offseason, probably longer. The 2014-15 NBA Championship was absolution for the basketball sins of their own franchise, redeeming another long-suffering fan base and a collection of players who had been subjected to the stockades of hot take nonsense. They won a title for their fans and their colleagues, their families, their children, for their ghosts, for jumpshooters, for small ball. That basketball community, ghosts and all, has a different struggle to work through today.

Watching Stephen Curry drift through last night’s post-game press conference with brutal honesty was a different sort of emotion. We are not all Cleveland, or all Oakland, but we are certainly all human beings who have worked ourselves to the bone for something, only to see it slip away at the last moment. You can hate his swagger and hubris — which he freely acknowledged in admitting he hadn’t blown past Love on that penultimate possession because he had been hunting for a three-pointer — but it’s hard not to identify with his humanity.

Draymond Green came back onto the floor last night, waiting for an opportunity to congratulate LeBron and bury the hatchet. What he did in Game 7 — 32 points, 15 rebounds, 9 assists, 2 steals, 6-of-8 on three-pointers, suffocating defense — will be an unfortunate footnote to the legacy of his flagrant fouls and suspension. On the court, he was a flamethrower, melting the Cavs’ offense and defense, with more than a little collateral damage. In the end, he, like Curry is a human dude who was at his absolute best one moment and his out-of-control worst in another. That personal calculus was part of the larger equation that worked out to him sitting at the podium with a blank, exhausted expression, while the Cavs coated the visitor’s locker room with Moet.

*****

By the time the press conferences had started, I was back on the futon, laptop open. Hands kind of shaky. Trying to make sense of history, processing someone else’s joy and someone else’s crushing sadness.

I would assume that most of the 44 million people who watched Game 7 were like me — theoretically emotionally impartial observers, fans primarily of basketball, curious to see how the 2015-16 NBA season would end. While memory of the specific events might fade (although the The Block, The Shot and The Stop will have some staying power), I’d like to think that the emotion will hold — Cleveland’s joy, Golden State’s sadness, and the way both can flow into us fellow humans simply by watching.

I always forget how emotional the end is.

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