We Interrupt This Blog to Bring You Some Thoughts on Basketball

It's hard to write about the San Antonio Spurs and not tell you about how much I love them, how I admire their dedication, fearlessness, and character. How for me they epitomize everything I love about sports in general and, in so many ways, the basic tenet held most tightly by my heart-that good should always triumph. The good guys, the ones who don't boast, who are the very embodiment of sportsmanship, as far as I'm concerned, are the ones who should always take the trophy at the end of the day.

But all of you know how I feel about this team, and I'm sure you can imagine how I feel today, as the Spurs tilt one more time towards the windmills carried to this court by time and age.

So let me say something else, instead.

Let me note that no matter what my heart may wish, no matter what all of our hearts may desire, the good guys, the team players, the soft speakers and respectful heroes DO NOT ALWAYS WIN. Not in "real" life, not on the battlefield, and most particularly not in basketball. If they did win more often than not, Stockton and Malone would have won in '97, and definitely in '98. They were good guys, who had worked so hard for so long, and they deserved it. You knew that in your heart.

But they didn't win, because sometimes, oftentimes, the best team doesn't win. The best player does. And as much as I would love to turn Jordan and James into the bad guys and rage about an unfair world, that's not really what it comes down to. Instead, it comes down to a simple truth that I learned a long, long time ago:

There is always someone better. Always. Someone stronger, faster, smarter, taller, wiser, or any other adjective that you can come up with.

That's what the Spurs are faced with, what we are all faced with at some point in our lives. That someone better. In the Spurs case, it is, of course, LeBron James. Arguing about whether or not he is the best player on the planet today is pointless. He simply is, whether you like it or not. And as I consider this game tonight, I'm reminded of all of those moments where the best player wins. That's how the world works-transcendental, generational athletes, leaders, visionaries carry their team to a higher ground, and it is so very, very hard to overcome that particular flavor of greatness.

And yet.

And yet, once in a while, they don't win. Once in a while, greatness can be overcome by desire, by a need so deep and mighty that it can overcome the inertia of greatness.

Once in a while, miracles happen, as one happened in Lake Placid in 1980. A team can come together and function as one, as something unbelievably greater than the sum of their parts.  And you know what?

That sum is far greater than any individual can hope to be.

Now, just being a good team doesn't automatically mean that this is going to be the outcome. But it is something fantastic that we can yearn for.

It's what I'm yearning for every day lately, as I spend all of my time studying the seemingly endless ways a human body can break down in the face of living. That I can learn enough so that I and my fellow healthcare professionals can, as a team, as a group, gain some ground in the war on suffering.

It's what we yearn for when we teach our children the Golden Rule, that loving and trusting others can bring us all to a place where the unrelenting cruelness of a violent, angry world cannot touch us.

And it's what I am yearning for in this NBA finals that begins tonight.

Something fantastic. Because every fantastic moment that we can string together keeps us hoping for the next one.

So. Once more into the breach, dear friends.

#GoSpursGo