Shake the lurch

The Pacers mislaid identity, whether teams get to mourn, and reinterpreting omens.

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Something is going on with me. If I had suspicions they were confirmed when, stepping off the elevator at the top floor of the Toronto Reference Library, I burst into tears at the sight of a guy sitting splayed leg on the floor in front of the archival photography filing cabinets, happily flipping through prints.

Seconds earlier, looking out from the glass tube of the elevator into the open atrium of the library as it lifted, I choked up at the play of light over the floors, the rows and rows of books, the people with their heads bent in concentration over big shared tables. Struck, both times, by a sudden rush of raw gratitude. A feeling that flooded past the usual checks of control, like the surge of tide going over a breakwall.

Not the first time I’ve cried in the library or for the library, but I felt no warning. Only the grasp of feeling, scrabbling in my chest.

How does a person handle grief when it isn’t explicitly yours? When its senselessness and cruelty occurs close enough to be relative, linked, but the ravages of each do not reach you. Or, appear as envoys cloaked in other emotions. The result, I’m finding, a feeling of uselessness, cycling between a disconcerting stasis and hovering anxiety.

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Is there room for mourning in the NBA? By teams for the team they were mere months ago, the team they thought they’d be. Is that a sensation we allow for, can put a better name to than “losing”? Losing suggests a near future where circumstance can be reversed: the next game, next season. Losing, like winning, is a temporary state. Fortune’s lighthouse-fickle glance.

The situation where a team must put out of its head the iteration it swore it just saw, up and walking around, months ago — even minutes ago, if we’re talking about a sudden injury; rupture of tendon and of timeline, simultaneous — what is that?

We have plenty of euphemistic salvagings for that sort of seasonal pyre. A write-off, an ethical tank, a development year, but in them we assume a continuation where the team, that specific arrangement of people, left off. There is no finality, only reconfiguration.

So here is where the Pacers are.

Unclear when, if, or how they’ll have to give up the ghost and hard to, when everyone around them swears they can reclaim themselves. That with every person back in the lineup — first T.J. McConnell, then Andrew Nembhard, then Aaron Nesmith, then Obi Toppin, best to put Tyrese Haliburton out of your head — there is chance to return to form. To reanimate.