With the 25th pick in the Basketball Feelings Feelings Draft, Basketball Feelings selects... RELIEF

They’re doing it. They can’t. They won’t. They did. They’re going to. They didn’t.

The thing about where Toronto ended up is that it was bound to fall short of what Toronto fans expected, and go long, an overdue conclusion, to most anyone else.

We had — I had — gotten so used to a long postseason. It only took one year to make it feel familiar. To see the Eastern Conference Finals as just another next step in a long, logical line of steady and inevitable progress, instead of the slog it is. Last year wasn’t easy, I don’t have amnesia over that. But this season was. This season felt, despite all the strains and sprains, easy, felt buoyant. Moving with its own impulsive pace, the traditional wrench of foundering bodies that ought to have thrown months worth of wins only became an eager excuse to try something, and come out 53-19 for it.

Relief in losing. Can that be right?

Here, I’ll try.

First, broadly, that it’s over. Not the whole thing, only the part my heart was lodged in like a trading card snug between bike spokes. Everything now is easy. The games can go whatever way. I already see them going several directions in my head and none of them upset me, they are all winding roads through interesting scenery. I can, likely will, fall asleep through them. Doze off toward the start of the 2nd and wake up halfway through the 4th, not disoriented and only blinking to catch up.

You forget how little you watch, actually watch, basketball happening when your team is the one doing it. When each move — every slipped screen, jammed finger roll — is not agony, you are able to watch the whole thing unfold from a comfortable distance, safe in the dark. No longer the suffering conductor of your own anxious symphony, you stop hearing the horns come in early, the woodwinds go flat, the roiling drums drown everything else out, you realize there’s a song there.

Second, very personal, that this outlier year didn’t end in an outlier championship and that the high-water marks of my career within it weren’t going to bleach out, quit existing. Relief in the untangling of a team’s season with my own, though they were so, at the peak auroral, ear-ringing points, tightly tied, loosening them doesn’t lessen a thing. Thinking in December, while huffing the stale and permanent sweat and chlorine tang of an arena tunnel and getting my pulse under control, that February could take me to Chicago and that February in Chicago, wind-burnt and gunning it, would take me so far past where I’d even projected, it was impossible not to parallel myself with a team where the only answer to having things tossed at it was to trust that forward was best and to not be shy about getting there.

After everything — Kawhi leaving, Lowry on a one year, being counted out, the injuries, the 40-point comeback, keeping it up in the dragging Toronto winter leading to All-Star, keeping it up in the dragging Toronto winter after All-Star — and then the pandemic, tragedy, terror, time evaporating, it felt like there was only one right outcome for it all to count. It didn’t even feel delusional, it felt, if anything, intensely rational. Proof that everything happened.

And to go out the way they did.

Lowry’s fouling out, Siakam’s absences, VanVleet dribbling the ball away, each bounce literally and figuratively farther from the necessary outcome. It was so, just, ordinary, in a season that wasn’t.

Relief came to me slow, though first not at all.

A gradual surfacing from a multi day migraine, spent completely prone, that set in the night of elimination. Waking to hard rain in a bed facing the woods, the feel of a knife slipping in and out of my left temple. Shifting to a passenger seat, bursts of sun through clouds, over two hours reclined on my side, jamming my head into my fingers against the headrest, not seeing the city grow ahead and then around me. Finally home, on the cool leather of my couch, any brief movement spiking a plume of nausea so trying not to, for hours. The tricky home intruder sensation of waking and waiting for pain. Is it still here, hunched behind something? I didn’t want to think about basketball, it was tied up too close in lancing, physical pain.

But somewhere in there I read a part of Raptors PR’s season sign-off, “Last COVID test done, all packed, and as Kyle said, time to leave this motherf**ker.” There were check-ins from the real world,

a morning after picture of a puppy from a long-suffering Knicks and Clippers fan,

and honed, needed barbs.

Blake sent me a note I read blinking to the surface three days later, kind and generous and congratulatory, something that reminded me I had come through it, the season and the apparent bodily harm of it ending.

It still all feels too close, a little bit, “Are we sure this is right?” even as things have moved entirely on. I know what happened but I don’t want to talk about it, and haven’t read a thing. The relief was and will still be little by little. The exhale, maybe, and the notion of looking forward.

The team goes home to their families, turns away from three months in an experiment where talking to media from Toronto every day, multiple times a day, only made it feel more isolating. I turn away and start to see the landscape shift, blips of potential as the tunnel vision blinks off.

It fits with fall, even as smoke from wildfires out west have turned the sky in Toronto a muted yellow-grey, not a solid colour as much as sickly bright, the relief of wrapping yourself in layers you put away when you were ready for your bare skin to go first but now, you’re too tender to be all the way out there, shorts and a crewneck seems fine. Or a jacket with somewhere to shove your hands still gripping, not all the way ready to let go yet.