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I'm sitting here at the local coffee shop, messenger bag draped over the left shoulder, just off of work, and for the first time in two weeks, signing into my Golden State of Mind account. "You need to write something, it doesn't matter what it is. Take a small transaction, extrapolate it into larger proportions, blow it up the asses of a fanbase thirsting for news that'll saturate a thirst just quenched by a trophy lifted not long ago. But there I was, scrolling through the links, reaching back into the Twitter accounts of Rusty Simmons, Diamond Leung, and desperately seeking a nugget worth expounding at least 500 fillers words. Except there's nothing. Or as I've learned at my first office job, just your usual Friday afternoon.
Yet everything is perfect.
This is the greatest offseason the Golden State Warriors will ever experience. Whether they win it all again next season, vanquishing the naysayers that truly believe that this title reeked of luck and injuries, or for the third time in five years like that baseball team across The Bay, nothing will match the exhilaration of the first time. I'm sure you can hone in on the metaphor I'm hinting at here so it's not worth immaturely mentioning.
The Warriors brought Draymond Green and Leandro Barbosa back, kept the exact same core, even refusing to trade the 30th pick despite rumors they might flip upwards. Those were the penultimate transactions of the last several celebratory months that featured more videos of Klay Thompson dancing, Draymond Green drinking, Stephen Curry singing, and Andrew Bogut wincing in pain (as usual). The silence is deafening but full with the weight of the Larry O'Brien, MVP trophy, the sighing of expectations met and exceeded. The Golden State Warriors are perfect as they could ever be and time is dragging so we can wallow in its beauty.
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Sports are unlike any other job. Fans, players, general managers, and everyone in between consistently whine during their time off, training and repeating for the moment that encapsulates all the cliches mentioned and exercised. Every single person is harvesting for the first bounce of the preseason, then the regular season, then the postseason, and we start all over again. The San Antonio Spurs are ready to unveil their new supervillain, attach to their legion of supersoldiers, and continuing to destroy the league from now until 2080. Somehow, Glen Davis thinks his Los Angeles Clippers could beat the Warriors. Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook are taking it slow recovering from their respective injuries but chomping at the bit is I'm sure an understatement into how they are feeling.
Everyone wants the days of August and September to fly by. The Golden State Warriors do not. Not me, at the very least.
I'm currently midway through a book that deals with learning how to live in the present, becoming self-aware in that moment, and getting in tune with our surroundings. Free advertisement for them here!
In it, there's a passage that leans into how we treat ourselves doing the automated actions that run the course of our day. We don't think when we wake up, get dressed, eat the same granola yogurt, brush our teeth, or even driving to work. We're stuck on autopilot. The physical movement of doing the same thing day in and day out has taken out the novelty and potential exhilaration of the simplest activities.
Fans are conditioned to treat the offseason as the woes of the mass - learned behavior that puts us in autopilot mode, despising the seconds, minutes, hours, and weeks without basketball. And it can and perhaps should be valid. Except along comes the perfect chasm in that haze of assumptions. The Golden State Warriors are the NBA Champions, the kings of the most prestigious and talented basketball association in the entire world. The comfortable fit of a champion has broken through the dreamy stupor that transfixes us when there's nothing but trade rumors, cap speak, and the potential rumor of a potential divorce of KD and the Thunder.
I'm used to hating the offseason. But this year? This year will do.