Events led to watching game with Dad

The last time a major Cleveland professional sports team won a championship, my dad wasn’t old enough to have a driver’s license.
Granted, he was probably driving anyway, but he wasn’t old enough to do it legally.
I never expected it this year, not with the best regular-season squad in NBA history coming out of the Western Conference. But when Draymond Green was suspended for game five of the NBA Finals last week, it gave me a glimmer of hope that the series might get to seven games.
With Green, the heart and soul of the Warriors, on the floor, the series was likely to end in the fifth game in Oakland. But with him gone, the Cavaliers had a real opportunity. And they always have a chance on their home floor, where game six would be played.
So I got to thinking, what if?
What if the series played out like it did, LeBron James and Kyrie Irving putting on virtuoso performances, becoming the first teammates to each surpass 40 points in an NBA Finals game in game five?
What if the team dominated game six from start to finish in front of a raucous Cleveland crowd?
If that happened, game seven would fall on Sunday, Father’s Day.
I hatched a plan.
So when publisher Jack Ronald mentioned that he’d like me to take over his Friday afternoon duties last week so he could have a little more time to prepare for his 50th class reunion, I offered him a deal. I would handle Friday afternoon, but if the Cavaliers won game six Thursday night I would take Monday off, allowing me to watch the seventh game of the NBA Finals with my dad.
If a Cleveland team was going to win a championship, I didn’t want to experience it from my home in Jay County. I wanted to experience it from my home in Avon, Ohio, where my love for sports was born.
So I made the 200-mile drive Saturday afternoon and surprised my dad as he was working on his barn. A little more than 24 hours later, we sat down with my mom, sister and niece to watch the game.
It marked just the second time in my nearly 38 years that a Cleveland team had been in this position. The other was game seven of the 1997 World Series that resulted in a loss in 11 innings.
I was 19 then, and a ball of nerves. This time, it was more subdued. The fact that the Cavaliers were playing a single game with the championship on the line didn’t seem real.
So as they started strong, struggled to end the first half and then rallied back behind some key shots from J.R. Smith, I was fairly stoic.
It wasn’t until Kyrie Irving’s three-point play with 4:33 left in the third quarter that I started to think it might actually happen.
When LeBron James hit a 3-pointer to give Cleveland a two-point lead with 4:52 left in the game, I silently threw my arms in the air. Moments later, Klay Thompson tied the game.
And so the score remained — 89-89 — for what seemed like forever.
There was a moment of levity when my mom referred to Steph Curry as a “twerp,” but as the clock ticked past the three-minute mark my face began to twitch. Nerves.
The rest — James’ block, Irving’s 3-pointer and everything else — is a blur. When James hit his free throw with 10 seconds left to give the Cavaliers a four-point lead, I knew the game was over.
It just didn’t feel like it. And it still didn’t feel like it after the clock struck zero.
I sat with my hands on my head in disbelief.
Shouldn’t there be one more quarter, one more game, one more series? Did our team — a Cleveland team — really just win? Was 52 years of heartbreak really over?
I’ve often doubted those who say in the moment after a big win that they can’t find the words to describe it or that it’s surreal. But I couldn’t, and it was.
This was about so much more than just a game.
As James wrote when he returned to the team two years ago: “In Northeast Ohio, nothing is given. Everything is earned. You work for what you have.”
This was about a proud city that has been through so much pain but has never given up.
This was a about a team erasing decades of sports torture in the perfect fashion, fighting back from a three-games-to-one deficit that had never been overcome in the history of the game.
This was about finally being able to utter the words my dad did to break the stunned silence late Sunday night.
“We’re the champs. We’re the champs.”