Well, that was unexpected.  This article is going to end up as some kind of Jekyll/Hyde hybrid, a result of an incredibly strange sporting experience Sunday evening in Seattle.

For the first half, it was like watching an ugly breakup between strangers: I’d never visited the city before, and I’ve never followed the Sonics more than casually, so I wasn’t really aware of their history until some recent reading informed me that this will likely be the team’s last season here, with a move to Oklahoma next season a certainty unless the courts prevent it.  The story of the breakup is the same as most these days: the team wants a new stadium, the city doesn’t want to pay for it.  So the new ownership wants to move out, to a younger woman, leaving Seattle the team name and history in the bargain.

Are they?  Are they really?  The fact that it’s Fan Appreciation Month only added to the irony of the night.

The fans were all fully aware of the impending move, as well as the team’s dismal record (the Sonics need to win out this season in order to tie their all-time worst record of 23 wins in their inaugural season).  There was absolutely no noise in the first half, and when I say no noise, I mean no noise.  Music would play, and nobody would chant or yell defense or even clap.  It was like a funeral.  The crowd made more noise for the introduction of Carmelo Anthony and Allen Iverson of the Nuggets than it did for Kevin Durant, the local rookie superstar.  It was like being at a pre-LT Chargers game.  But who could blame them?  Their team is in the cellar and about to hit the highway, and they were about to play a flashy playoff-caliber team who had beaten the Sonics by an average of 37.8 gazillion points in each of their meetings this season.  

But in the third quarter, something happened.  The half-empty arena realized that their boys were actually in the game, and they began to rally behind the impressive offensive performance of Durant.  Defensively, he struggled to contain Anthony, who finished with a game-high 38 points, but he was everywhere on the offensive side of the court.  The crowd began to come alive, and, by the end of the fourth quarter, fathers were holding their sons in one hand and their twenty-year old Sonics hats in the others.  They didn’t want to lose this experience.  “Just a little more,” they begged.  And then Kevin Durant hit a three-pointer to send it to overtime.

At the end of the first overtime, he hit an even more improbable three pointer to send it to a second overtime, and the crowd was going nuts.  Suddenly, my wife (who was attending her first NBA game and was very excited) and I were enormous Sonics fans, cheering with the Squatch (one of the weirdest mascots in sports) and the city and giving high fives to baseball dads with beer bellies as Durant piled it on, aided by his fellow rookie Jeff Green.  

It was an odd night, because it was so much more than just one game.  Late in the second overtime, the announcer told the fans, “One more time, get on your feet and cheer!” and we all knew he was referring to more than tonight’s game; April is the Sonics’ Fan Appreciation Month, a fact none of them seemed very proud of; when an usher stopped a man near me from entering the arena, with a sign that said “Please wait to enter, ball in play,” the man brushed her aside, muttering angrily, “It’s just the Sonics.”  But improbably, those same Sonics pulled ahead in double OT and didn’t look back, winning by a final score of 151-147.  The fathers around us (who hadn’t committed the egregious and unforgivable sin of leaving an OT game early) hugged their sons and their battered caps close, not wanting to give up their future or their past with this franchise. 

The Key Arena, future former home of the Seattle Supersonics

Barring a miracle, it’s unlikely that the Sonics will play even two more games in the Key Arena.  But on Sunday, Kevin Durant looked into the crowd, saw the pleas in the fans’ eyes, and gave them a precious ten minutes more with the team they’ve loved (and hated) for forty years.  Caught between warring lovers, that’s all they could have asked for.