“I said this when I came from Sacramento, who I am as a person, I love hard.” – Tyrese Haliburton in 2023 to The Athletic
There will never be catharsis for Pacers fans who watched Tyrese Haliburton repeatedly slam his fist to the court screaming in pain. For him, redemption and vindication, perhaps. But for a fanbase on the precipice of the unprecedented? No.
Whatever beliefs we had planted, hopes we nurtured, and dreams we allowed to grow were ripped from us wholly with 5:02 left in the first quarter of game 7 of the NBA Finals. Because we loved too hard. Because that’s what fandom does to you.
Hope is an elixir and a poison.
The dreams brought by Paul George’s consecutive conference finals runs were shattered, two months later, by a broken leg. Victor Oladipo’s resurgence in his return to Indiana was ripped apart by a career-altering quadriceps tendon tear.
Those two injuries ended the brilliant chapters those stars authored. They demanded a trade or declined an extension and were traded. George’s trade brought Indiana Oladipo and Sabonis, the two of whom, when traded, brought Indiana Haliburton and the core around him.
Together, through friendship and frenzy, that new core took themselves, the franchise, and the fanbase right to the edge, to the very edge, of a dream every one of us collectively longs for.
And then Tyrese Haliburton tore his achilles tendon in game 7 of the NBA Finals.
Nihilism beckons.
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You can go your whole life as a sports fan and never witness a season and run of clutch play like Tyrese Haliburton and the Pacers put together this year. In fact, until this year, no one had ever witnessed it, because it had never happened.
Since 1980, no team had won 10 or fewer of its first 25 games and made the NBA finals. The Pacers did it. Before this postseason, only one team in the play-by-play era had won a playoff game trailing by three possessions in the final minute of play. Then the Pacers did it three times in a month.
The NBA made promotional videos of Tyrese’s clutch shot-making that were, impossibly, made too soon because he hit one more game winning shot to kick off the finals.
It was beyond explanation, a magical season and postseason run that was like a mathematical problem with an undefined variable making 1 + 1 equal 16. Chemistry, coaching, the mandate of heaven?
The players themselves offered platitudes in postgames about how it all came together, the season and game-winners, and it basically comes down to belief. Perhaps more than any professional sports team in recent memory, this Indiana Pacers team never gave up. They believed, and they hoped.
* * *
Hope is not merely sustaining; it is sustenance. Hope is on this side of adversity. It is a prerequisite for progress, a mandate for redemption and personal growth.
And for all that, hope would not exist without its counterpart. We only know joy for what it is because it is impermanent, because it interrupts monotony, suffering, and loss. Hope cannot merely exist; it must co-exist.
And it is that duality that will forever define the 2024-25 Indiana Pacers and Tyrese Haliburton’s season. Impossibility and inevitability. Ecstasy and agony. A ball bouncing high off the rim and a fist slammed into the floor.
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