I was standing in front of my TV late one Wednesday evening. I had prior arrangements causing me to miss Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals—so I hit record on the YouTube TV app and decided I would completely power my phone off for a few hours so I could savor watching the Indiana Pacers on one of the biggest stages in the sport.
Admittedly, I had begun fast forwarding through pieces of the game. Sure, Aaron Nesmith was unconscious, but Jalen Brunson was scoring on the other end. It got to 9 points with under a minute left.
“Oh well, you just have to take 1 of the first 2,” I thought to myself.
I skipped forward 10 seconds, and the thumbnail preview showed a 5-point game.
“What happened?”
Nesmith had hit another 3. At this point, I was almost annoyed. Each time I had accepted this game being over, they’d make me stay up just a bit later to partake in another soul-crushing Knicks bucket. I have work tomorrow! Didn’t they know that?
A few minutes later I was jumping around. Silently as possible, for fear of waking up roommates and neighbors, but still jumping around in utter disbelief. Loudly whispering, “Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh.”
And then a groan when I realized Tyrese Haliburton’s toe was on the line. Not like this! Don’t rope me back in like this!
Who was I kidding? It didn’t matter. These were the 2025 Indiana Pacers after all. Overtime at that point was a formality. They weren’t going to lose that game. That’s not what they do.
This was Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals—and for me it felt like the peak. It was a game you’d trade a lifetime of sports memories for. The shock of the bitter rivals, the euphoria of a win grasped from certain defeat, the homage to the franchise legend sitting courtside, calling the game, only able to laugh as Haliburton’s shot fell in.
At that moment, I didn’t care about the rest of the series. I didn’t care about the Finals appearance. This season has already been cemented as the playoff run of a lifetime. We hadn’t even reached the technical mountain of the sport, and it felt like Haliburton had already summitted sports-Everest three times in a month.
Little did I know, this team would still be fighting a month later. Game 1 of the NBA Finals, equally stunning, was on the horizon.
I had no clue this 50-win team (who, let’s be honest, became a 1B to Oklahoma City’s 1A sometime around the turn of the calendar) would pummel one of the greatest teams in NBA history in an elimination game to force a Game 7 of the NBA Finals—something reserved only for the titans of the sport.
And before that game could even breathe, before it even had a personality, before the tense moments of a game 7 could sink in—Tyrese Haliburton tore his Achilles. In the biggest game of his life, in the most anticipated game of any Thunder or Pacers’ fans’ lives, there he was—slamming the court and overcome with what felt equal parts physical and emotional pain.
The 25-year-old author of one of basketball’s greatest stories, in the middle of the story’s final chapter, was just gone.
“I’ve worked my whole life to get to this moment and this is how it ends?,” he [wrote after surgery on Monday](https://ipacers.com/2025/06/24/tyrese-haliburton-makes-incredible-statement-after-surgery-to-repair-achilles-tendon-injury-in-nba-finals/). “Makes no sense.”
Nothing has hurt me more as a sports fan than Game 7. I would challenge that nothing in sports is capable of hurting someone more. Any longtime sports fan has those moments. The what-ifs. The devastating playoff loss. The star player whose career was cut short. Each of them alone, capable of punching you so hard that you have nothing to do but retreat to constant reminders that it’s “just sports.”
Game 7 was all of these somehow. At once. The team that had been latched onto, not only by Pacers fans, but basketball fans everywhere as one of the greatest stories professional sports has seen, saw the most tragic ending possible.
Nothing made sense from that point on. I simultaneously felt like I was watching a random February regular season game against the Charlotte Hornets and also felt the existential dread of what a loss would mean – no title this year and now no Haliburton for two years. Nothing seemed to matter or have a punch, even when the Pacers led by 1 at half. It somehow felt like a game that had no stakes, and a game that they HAD to win. For Indiana. For Haliburton. For everyone, otherwise we risked a year of wandering in a sports desert.
It hurt. It won’t stop hurting.
I’ve long wondered what it would feel like for the Indiana Pacers to win a championship. Would I coast off of that feeling for weeks? Months? Years? One of the most painful parts of that Game 7 loss was seeing the celebration of Thunder fans and players. I wondered what that felt like. Does it hit you all at once? Does it feel real?
Those are answers we’ll never know with this Pacers team.
“We’ll get ‘em next year” doesn’t apply here.
Even if Haliburton is back here someday with the Pacers—it may be a dramatically different team and certainly will come in dramatically less entertaining fashion. Four game-winners isn’t happening again in a single playoff run. It just isn’t. We will always wonder “what if” with this group. What it would have meant to cap off this run, these moments, with a title. It’s an answer we’ll never fully know, and one we will likely spend the rest of our lives searching for.
But, in a weird way, that may be the joy of the 2025 Indiana Pacers. They weren’t champions. They didn’t walk off the court with a trophy on Sunday. Their best player was on crutches with a towel over his head. T.J. McConnell was wandering aimlessly around the court after the final buzzer, seemingly not wanting to come to terms with what had just happened. Obi Toppin covered his face, and admitted later that he felt part of the blame for Haliburton’s injury. Nesmith’s tears after fouling-out felt like some kind of cruel, sick punishment. It wasn’t a happy ending.
And yet, the fact that Sunday hurt so much was a testament to just how much the 2025 Indiana Pacers made you feel. They made sports seem hopeful again. Like, maybe sometimes, the underdog does win. That David can beat Goliath. That a team playing in lockstep for each other is more powerful than individual greatness and cold, calculated team-building.
Are any of those things true? They weren’t for the Indiana Pacers. Goliath did win. The individual greatness of the MVP and absurd talent of the machine that is Oklahoma City finally delivered a knock-out punch.
“There’s no moral victories here. We lost. That’s the way I look at it,” Myles Turner said.
But their story, and the story of the 2025 NBA Playoffs, can not be told without the team that pushed them to a Game 7. The team that was capable of taking anyone who dared to believe to the mountaintop of sports. The team that left longtime national media members, like Zach Lowe, dumbfounded—wondering if this team, the runner-ups, are the lasting memory.
Lowe spoke with a front office executive before game 7. An architect of a team, someone trained in the measured business of basketball, couldn’t even fully understand it.
“I asked, ‘What do you take out of this Pacers run, whether they win or lose?’” Lowe stated. “And \[the executive\] said, ‘Hope.”
The moment hurts, in part because everything leading up to it was so joyous, so lifegiving. There can’t be a crash, a gut-punch, a dagger to the heart, if there wasn’t something to hold onto before. And that something will be held onto forever.
The beautiful thing about sports is the journey. We don’t watch sports for the finality of it. We watch sports because we love the competition, the moment, the tension. We don’t watch to see if we get a parade at the end of the year.
No, there isn’t something tangible coming home to Indiana. The stark reality is, the Pacers’ homecoming was their star player in a wheelchair in the middle of the night. Their name won’t be engraved in the Larry O’Brien Trophy.
However, part of me doesn’t care. I don’t need their name written in the basketball record books to validate the hope that I had.
The NBA will move on. The Thunder’s potential dynasty will begin and history will remember them as a rightful champion.
But for those who were along for the ride, whether it be lifelong Pacers fans or basketball fans captivated by the ball movement, chaos, speed and heart of which the Pacers played, it is hard to imagine NBA history being told without a breath about them—because it can’t.
Because the 2025 Pacers were finally killed. Goliath finally won. But in a world where stories to tell and memories to relive feel more vital than the very air we breathe, the 2025 Indiana Pacers will never die.
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