Portland Trail Blazers CRUSH the Golden State Warriors

My wife and I have been married for over 30 years. This is kind of surprising because until I met her, which was when I was in my early 30's, I was never going to get married. Evidently something changed when I hit my 30's. My wife was looking at her 30th birthday and she wasn't married yet, so I suspect we both decided that if we were going to do this thing, now is the time. So we did.

On occasion people ask us the secret of out success, i.e. how have we managed to stay together for so long? I used to tell them that it was like we were on a teeter-toter, we balanced each other. Later on I embellished that by saying it was a very long teeter-toter, but that didn't really help. Eventually I came to realize that we had complimentary skills, i.e. I realized that my formidable technical skills weren't the be-all and end-all of skillification. My wife had skills as well. Not hard skills, not skills that you could employ to actually do something, but skills that enabled you to maintain your position in society, which is actually more important than any mathematical or machinical talent you might have.

We went to see a counselor a few years ago and  I attempted to commuicatie this idea to him, and he says "oh yes, it's very common for people with complimentary skill sets to hook up", or words to that effect, and I thought "well fuck you, why the fuck didn't anyone ever tell me that?" But then I realized that even if anyone had told me that I probably would have discounted it because all that kind of talk didn't impact the hard-skill-set-universe.

TL';DR, my wife and I are different. Things you might think only apply to one sex, in our case don't. Specifically, my wife likes sports. In particular she likes watching the Ducks (because our kids went there) and the Hawkeyes (because she went there) college football, and the Portland Trailblazers professional basketball team.

I never used to watch sports. Oh I would watch it on occasion if I was visiting a friend and they were watching a game, but I never followed it or kept track of who was leading or winning or whatever. If just didn't interest me. But now I am. I started a few years ago, I would sit in with my wife while she was watching a game and I would watch a quarter or so, but that was all, so I guess I kind of learned how to watch. I mean there is a lot of complicated action going on down there. Even with the slow motion replays it is sometimes hard to tell exactly just what happened. Nurkic got hit in the face with Kevin Durrant's upper arm tonight, or did he? I mean, from the video,  you just can't tell how hard he got hit. He sold it pretty well, and given the limited information we got from the video, I am willing to give him the credit. But Stott's expression on the screen tells me that Nurkic was selling the foul, and Jusuf would be fine.

Whatever. In any case, this year I have been watching the Trialblazers pretty religiously and tonight's game was a highwater mark. The Trialblazers last game was against the Utah Jazz and they got trounced. But more importantly, in that game I just didn't see any energy from the Blazers. It was like they knew they were going to get beat and they would do their job but they just didn't care. And this is all from watching the game. I don't listen to the players or coaches jabbering, to me it's just jabber. Maybe next year I will be listening for inflections in their voices in how they talk about upcoming games, but I hope not. That way lies madness, at least for people like me.

Tonight, however, was a different kettle of fish. The Warriors are the golden boys of the Western Division, or maybe of the whole nation. Three (or maybe four) of their players have been picked for the All-Star Game which is some kind of big deal. They have beat every team in the league. They are formidable. We are going to get our asses kicked.

But then the game stared and the Blazers attacked! They ran up something like a 20 point lead during the first half. Before the game started some blatherer was blathering that the third quarter is when the Warriors kicked butt, and that kind of correlated with what I have been seeing, the third quarter is critical. So okay, we're ahead at the half, but are we going to be able to hang on? When the game started I was totally prepared to concede defeat. After all, even though we had won most of our games so far (I think), the UItah Jazz still kicked our butt. Efffing Jazz. But now I'm watching the game, and this is not like the Jazz game. Our guys are showing some serious energy. How can you even tell? It's just images of people moving around on the screen. We're talking highly evolved image processing techniques, stuff that the computer geeks won't ever be able to emulate. Well, at least not till later next week.

The game was fierce. You could tell, just by watching it. Or could you? I could, because I've been watching the Blazers all season. If you just tuned in and had never seen the Blazers play before, could you have told? I suppose it you had watched a lot of basketball on TV, you probably could have picked up on it. So there's two conditions here. One, you have to spend some time watching the game, and two, you have to be able to 'see' what's going on.

In any case, we defeated the Warriors by the skin of our teeth, and that's good enough for me.