Normally on a day like this, after what happened at Madison Square Garden last night, I would have hopped out of bed early and banged out 25,000 words about the latest inexplicable Pacers, come-from-behind win.
Funny thing happened last night, though. If funny is a proper synonym for infuriating.
At 7:59 I set aside my small screen where I was watching YouTube vids and hit the power button on the remote to fire up the big screen for the game. The TV began it’s warmup process and just as the screen came to life, our power went out.
There were no storms at the time. We didn’t hear the sound of a transformer blowing somewhere near us. Nor someone using a chainsaw that had possibly sent a tree towards a power line as happened last month two houses down the block.[1]
So I waited a few minutes in case it was one of the temporary outages that we sometimes experience.
No dice.
By the time I dug out my little radio, the Pacers were up by six early.
I checked our power company’s website but it did not show any outages in our area. I refreshed it a couple times without any updates, so went to the page where you report outages. Naturally it was not working. Our power company is truly the worst when it comes to customer relations. If there’s one page on a utility’s website that should never go down, it is their Report An Outage page!
So I called. The nice lady who eventually answered said there had been reports from 15 others in our area, they couldn’t identify what the cause was yet, but that a crew was on the way to investigate. By the time we got off the phone the outage map showed 48 people in our little area were without power. There weren’t any other large outages in the city, so I hoped that meant a quick resolution. By halftime, at least.
All I could do was wait and listen to the game on the radio. Which was what I did for the next three-and-a-half hours. Thus I missed much of the experience.
The Pacers hung with the Knicks until the fourth quarter, when they decided to stop playing defense and gave up a huge run despite Jalen Brunson sitting on the bench with five fouls. I was about to turn the radio off and go to bed late in the fourth quarter with the Pacers down 14. Time to get ready for game two.
Then Aaron Nesmith hit a 3. And another. And another. And another. Meanwhile the Knicks were missing shots, both from the field and the free throw line, and turning the ball over. When Nesmith hit his fifth 3 of the quarter it was suddenly a two-point game. The teams exchanged some free throws as the Pacers slowly ran out f time.
As I said last month, though, never count the Pacers out.
This was not nearly as cool on the radio, as I didn’t see Tyrese Haliburton’s frantic retreat to the arc, the insanely high carom of his shot off the rim, the ball falling through the net, nor the wild celebration. The Pacers radio guys went momentarily crazy but quickly saw that Haliburton’s toe was on the line and that the game would be going to overtime.
As tends to happen in these situations, the team that ended regulation on the run and had the miracle finish kept the momentum and the Pacers stole game one. Thank goodness for Haliburton, as it would have been tough to come back from giving the Reggie Miller choke sign to the crowd and then losing the game.
This is the third time the Pacers have done this in this year’s playoffs, coming from at least seven points down in the final 50 seconds of regulation.
I tried to tell you people about how this team never gets rattled or gives up. Maybe you’ll start listening to me now.
(Edit: It was terribly fun to follow Pacers bloggers and listen to the radio announcers as they tried to talk themselves into the comeback after Nesmith’s third 3. So many variations of “Is this really going to happen again?” which got progressively louder as the deficit got smaller.)
Three wins to the Finals.
Oh, and the power came back on just after 4:00 AM. First I noticed that our bathroom light was on. Then I heard our TV downstairs, blasting whatever TNT shows at that ungodly hour. Now I have a fun morning ahead of clearing our two fridges of all the perishables and making a trip to the grocery store to replace them.[2] In the midst of the outage I was doing research on whole-home generators. If we assume L is going to get a fat academic scholarship in two years, we might be able to make it work…