Could it be anymore perfect that Game 7 is on Father's Day?
Sports is about so much— the spectacle of human skill and physicality, the value of hard work and teamwork, the ability to handle victory and defeat.
But it's also, maybe more than anything, about community. I don't mean the tribal "Us vs. Them" attitude it can incite— I mean the fact that you can make friends with a stranger at a bar 1,000 miles from home because you're both invested in the same match. The fact that you can share strategy for hours about rec league softball with a co-worker you might have nothing else in common with. The fact that you can talk passionately about how these Finals have gone, and what they mean, with any fan of any team anywhere.
Sports is its own language, as nuanced and embedded in culture as any on planet Earth.
And in a day and age when you can ask Google instead of your dad for advice on anything, it can be a unique connective thread. You can use Wikipedia to learn the history of Ohio and Cleveland sports, but you can't hear the pain in its voice as it recounts the details the way you can from fathers and grandfathers. The way you feel emotion in these touchstones is not in remembering how a ball went through a hoop, or over a fence, or into the ground— it's in remembering the people you love as it happened.
Probably the most poetic thing is that the man Cleveland has its hopes pinned on— that hometown Akron kid, the “Chosen One”— didn't grow up with a father. Or rather he didn't grow up with one in a "traditional" sense. He found his father figures through basketball, through men in his community who stepped up to lead and provide. Who helped him become who he is today.
Tonight is one of those touchstones. Win or lose. For Ohio, for families in all their forms, for me and my dad.
All in.