Nuggets: wishing the regular season would never end
“There’s a certain sense of impending doom that always starts to grow about now. With only four games left in the regular season I can’t help but feel like the good times are about to stop rolling.”
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I know precisely how long I have been a Nuggets fan. Like many people, I was raised in a Broncos household. Nobody else in my family cared about basketball at all, but I latched on when I was thirteen, old enough to catch the buzz surrounding the team in the hallways of Horace Mann Junior High school. I remember the 1984 / 1985 season and the loss to the Lakers in the Western Conference Finals pretty clearly. I can also recall assuming that the Nuggets would be back there again. Little did I know I would be pushing 40.
Since the season when I first embraced roundball the Nuggets have been to the playoffs about half the time, despite the eight year drought under Bickerstaff, Hanzlik, D’Antoni, Issel and Bzdelik during which they won as few as eleven games. Aside from that dark period, they’ve been a fun team to root for, although more so in the regular season than in the playoffs. As a Nuggets fan I have been conditioned to consider their making it to the post-season as the fulfillment of an objective and the playoffs themselves as something to be feared.
There’s a certain sense of impending doom that always starts to grow about now. With only four games left in the regular season I can’t help but feel like the good times are about to stop rolling. The playoffs are coming – and, while I am as excited as anybody that the Nuggets will be a part of it, I rue the games.
I wish this historic regular season would never end. It’s such a blast watching this high flying, fast breaking squad of no-names take it to the best teams in the West – especially in Mile High air of Pepsi Center where they’ve won 1,000 in a row. The Nuggets seem to be enjoying it, too. There’s lost of smiling and chest bumping and waving of towels when they are defending and running the floor and alley-ooping.
Soon the heat will be on. Once the consequence of losing becomes elimination watching the Nuggets won’t be as fun anymore. Exciting, yes – but less enjoyable in the sense that we all know how things will end. Denver could make it past the first round. In fact, I believe they will. They could even make it back to the Conference Finals like they did back in 2009, but it’s somewhat doubtful. Not even the most optimistic fan could see them going further than that – and, even if they did, they would be cannon fodder for the Heat in the Finals as would any Western Conference team.
The Denver Nuggets are not going to win a Championship in 2013. Since I know that, I would prefer to be entertained than to be counting down the days until the inevitable close of the season. This year has been fantastic, probably the most fun I have had watching the Nuggets since Carmelo Anthony first came to town. I don’t want to get off this ride
