"How do we end this now?"
The apartment has ants.
Coming from inside the walls, probably, this house so old that every groaning sigh with the seasons makes the gaps more generous, but we only see them on them. Tracking slowly up, down and across the walls, and just until the weather turns warm enough that they move outside for the rest of summer.
It feels like more of a stalling. A waiting around. Ultimately pretty polite.
We put down traps. Little aluminum pucks with holes punched in the sides, easy access to the poison the ants are supposed to carry home. I watch from the tub, or the kitchen table, as tiny black specks march determined across a sun-smeared wall, another gingerly starting its vertical ascent from the baseboard. Doing my makeup in the bathroom mirror and my eyes suddenly shift their focus onto one cutting quickly across the glass, emerging from what looks like my eyebrow. Watch Jeans, sprawled on the rug by the sink, set a paw firmly down on another, holding it until I get there to collect.
It’s a massacre for a week. We share our counts from the kitchen or bathroom, the only two rooms they get into.
Five.
Seven.
Crunching them in single squares of toilet paper. Feeling bad the times we miss and they try to go rushing away.
Just two that time.
Eight.
A reality bending string of days where I don’t trust my eyes. Where a speck on the floor, a shadow on the wall, tricks me into thinking there’s another tiny death to tend to. And then just like that they clear out, and everything that shouldn’t be stops moving.
A lot of this season has been spent looking for answers. For explanations that escape based on how illogical, how repellent of the neat and dulling math a season can come with, the circumstances. Still, the league has taken these weird parameters, warped and melded them, to better serve itself. A never-ending shaking flex at normalcy all season.
Usually, the end of a season brings various measures of relief. A sense of accomplishment, finality, a weary but well-earned casting off, hope, new momentum, and a map of moments we’re as easily able to place on the calendar as much as emotional spectrum.
Getting to the end of this season has not felt like a marathon or a sprint, but a juddering and lurching set of hops and skips and stalls, without any of the breathless, raw, but full-body afforded relief. The teams that go on past here, with the exception of probably four, seem just as surprised as the teams that are now scattering into the offseason like a dandelion bloom unceremoniously weed-whacked.
It’s difficult if not impossible to remember what happened. And then, if you can, to place it in real time. Even knowing everything is digitized, that you can loosely plug “Anthony Edwards” “dunk” “winter” into a search and be proximately rewarded doesn’t help. What’s missing is the sense of that memory. The impact and the unspooling frenzy, all the loose-limbed ways we absorb and say wow. Everything feels like an echo. A rock slipping the surface until the ripples of the ripples replace the impact, nothing sinks in.
“How do we end this now?” Nick Nurse asked after the last answer to the last question in his last seasonal availability. He laughed and looked around.
Unceremoniously, as with anything else this season.
One way to handle what’s not there is hyperbole. A wash of promise, grandeur, effervescent doom. Like palming sunlight. It’s something that’s lived symbiotically alongside sports always but usually has a methodical grounding in the physicality of the game itself, if not an intact bullshit detector via the collective memory of fandom.
But that’s all out the window.
When Dudley says the Lakers position as the 7th seed will present the most difficult challenge “any team” has had “ever” in “NBA history”, a more reliable part of me understands this isn’t, can’t be, true. But in terms of immediate proof I can call up? My brain is so bad on what happened even last week, is more struck by abstract strokes of sensory overload — the thick smell of lilacs at night, the way the light sluiced into the high windows and onto the hardwood court of the gym overhauled into a mass-vaccination centre that I teared up in line from the effect — that if not inclined to believe him, there’s nothing I can call up quick to dispute his Herculean sad trombone.
Award season this year seems a wash for the same reason. There’s no such thing as the narrative vote vs the performance vote when everyone is eligible. Someone new has been added to the conversation every week since February, it feels like. But then how is anyone most valuable in a season that pressed up and kicked against the physical, mental and emotional boundaries of every player? How is anyone not?
When LeBron says Steph Curry is his MVP candidate it’s because James’s memory has been so Steph-studded, for so many seasons. For their “paths to continue to cross” in their careers, James said, and to have “been crossed again”, was the feat. I’m not sure that it’s even a stretch to say there must be some kind of small comfort in that routine of excellence, an impossibly easy habit of ascendence, for James in a season so otherwise upended. But then Steph is a constant for everybody. Elemental, untroubled, overlooked by how practical he’s made awe.
And then it’s Nikola Jokic because it is. It’s Joel Embiid because he’s become his own irresistible force paradox. It’s less Giannis but also why not. It’s Chris Paul’s eternal bossiness rising the Suns. It’s James Harden and that smoothie.
It’s Rudy Gobert because that feels the neatest full-circle on how this all started. It’s Luka Doncic’s good-natured and crushing efficiency. It’s Kawhi, turning that whole entire thing over there around. It’s Steph. It’s James. It is more than it isn’t.
What’s so difficult about the MVP, or Most Improved, even Rookie, is that if these are regular season awards, then what are they doing here, in this season? These awards are tidy markers that nobody agrees on but perfunctory or pained, they’re necessary punctuation on a season. How to consider, confer or carry them when it still isn’t clear what all happened here.