No, your computer isn’t messing up. The page isn’t taking too long to load. It’s not a typo. That blank space is simply a moment of silence in memoriam of a Friday night in which I drove over 700 miles roundtrip to watch my team get smashed.
I don’t regret it in the slightest.
A bit of backstory: I’ve been a Hawks fan my entire life. Plenty of awesome memories were made during my senior year of high school in 2015 when they went 60-22 and advanced to the Eastern Conference Finals before getting dusted by LeBron and Co. However, I really cut my teeth during the late 00’s, rooting for Hawks teams that featured Iso Joe Johnson and He’s Open for a Reason Josh Smith.
But no kettle of Hawks has captured my imagination quite like this Trae Young-led squad. The trash-talking. The shimmies. The memes. All of it has ignited my fandom into a state of Hawks-induced delirium. So I decided to use my geographical advantage as a Midwesterner to attend Game Two of the Eastern Conference finals against the Milwaukee Bucks.
Normally this is when I would write about scalping a ticket off some street urchin or drunk old man for $5 before saying what a riveting game it was. This was anything but that. After narrowly avoiding a scam (in which I had to weave through a crowd to chase down the person I stupidly handed $200 to) I settled for a standing room only seat in the upper bar at Fiserv Forum. It was like that famous GIF of Sting watching a match from the rafters, just with way more overpriced cocktails and lots of green neon lights.
Somehow the game went worse than the ticket experience. The Hawks have been on the road since last week and miraculously pulled off back-to-back wins over a top seeded Philadelphia 76ers team and this Bucks group that is pushing for a title. The smackdown was coming, but I didn’t anticipate this. After a Cam Reddish jumper early in the fourth quarter I pumped my fist and muttered “Nice, we’re not down by 40 anymore.”
Normally, driving across multiple state lines and dropping an honest day’s worth of work on a ticket to see my team get blown to smithereens would bring about biblical levels of complaining from me. But this time? It was one of the best purchases of my life.
COVID brought irreparable change to our world. You’ve probably seen and heard all about it so I won’t recap it here. One of the cruelest things it did was suck the joy out of things that so many people loved. For me, that was sports.
On its surface, the idea of living in a world that was restricted to my room, job, and occasional trips to the grocery store seems like the perfect chance to watch tons of sports. But it all just felt wrong. Sure, depression played a big part in that. But also the games just felt… dirty.
College football rushed ahead with rumors that players were getting sick in the summer so they wouldn’t miss time in the fall. The NFL and MLB plowed full steam ahead with no discernible plan. Even the NBA’s lauded bubble postseason plan ended up causing a dramatically shortened offseason that led to countless broken rosters during these very playoffs (and one equally dramatic Twitter thread from LeBron James).
All this combined to create an ickiness that stained the games to the point of being unenjoyable. Titles didn’t feel real. Games and the discussions around them often felt like the minuscule, meaningless events they wore as the world tore itself to shreds. Until now.
Walking into Fiserv Forum on Friday, fully vaccinated and without a care in the world, felt as if I had hooked myself up to a car battery. It was the recapturing of a specific type of joy that I honestly wasn’t sure I would ever get to feel again. The joy of being around a crowd, a real crowd, one that was pushing their team to new heights in a do-or-die moment. If being around that type of atmosphere means that I have to shell out cash to watch dudes named Thanasis and Bruno play basketball well then so be it.
The Hawks might win Game Three. Either way they probably won’t win the series. Honestly, who knows. The important thing is that our tiny little segment of the world seems like it is rounding the corner on normalcy, even if it’s in the most minute of ways.
But I’m still never going back to Milwaukee again.