Maturity

Someday, there will come an age in my life when, upon receiving a two-game suspension in City League basketball for technical fouls, we won't turn it into a joke, and I won't show up for our game to sit on the bench in a suit, and we won't ask our lawyer friend to draft a letter to the league President appealing the second game of the suspension. However, that age is not 27.

(Also, there will be an age in my life where I stop getting technical fouls, but that's beside the point. I thought I was done at age 24....in the last year I've had an itsy bitsy little relapse.)

Suspension or no, the Curtis J. Phillips organization finally broke through and won their first outright league title this season. Our rivalry with The Dawgs has been compared to the Suns/Spurs rivalry of the last five years (by me) in the sense that both us and the Suns have seemingly gone out of our way to invent creative ways to lose games. (Seriously, if you doctored the video to make the overall quality of basketball better, you could do a 30 for 30 documentary on our shenanigans with The Dawgs**, and it would be enjoyed by basketball fans. I promise you.) So it was only fitting that in the same year that the Suns finally knocked the Spurs out of the playoffs, we also got over the hump and defeated The Dawgs to clinch the championship.


**Shenanigans with The Dawgs, 2008-2010:

- One game we were up 9 with about 1:30 left to play. A bunch of missed free throws, a couple turnovers, and a thrown away inbounds pass at halfcourt leading to a breakaway layup with 3 seconds left later, and we lost by a point.

- One season we adopted the Suns' old '7 seconds or less' offense, and beat The Dawgs by 25 (although they had already clinched the title that year.) The next season, they had at least two players scouting every one of our games all season, then for the championship game, brought in a couple of ringers (technically legal due to a league loophole) who led them to a narrow victory. Needless to say, we had a little "chat" with them after this game. This is definitely our version of the 2007 Suns/Spurs series, when bullshit suspensions following Robert Horry's cheap shot on Steve Nash derailed the Suns.

- One game, during a particularly atrocious performance by the referees, one of the refs responded to our bench's chirping by threatening to fight two of our players in the parking lot. Needless to say, we were not the beneficiaries of an abundance of good calls down the stretch of this game.

- One game, we battled back from a late deficit, and down by three, I was fouled on a three pointer with five seconds left. I made the first two, back-rimmed the third, and we lost by a point.

- One game, we were down six with a minute left when I got T'd up and ejected. But The Dawgs missed both technical free throws, and the boys rallied around the ejection and tied it up with under ten seconds left, then won in overtime. However, we lost a different game to an inferior opponent earlier in the year, costing ourselves a share of the title.


Happy Friday.