Pistons in Six Man, is my head pingin'. You know the sound; you've heard it under the hood of your car before. I am a victim of some very old Michigan wisdom this morning. There's a difference between going to sleep and waking up versus passing out and coming to. See how bad off I've left myself? I'm stealing material. I have no choice. Five hours and fifty minutes ago I was pouring the last dregs of a bottle of Rolling Rock down my throat (about my ninth one of the night), flipping through the ads on TV. It didn't matter what came across the screen. All that mattered was that my own personal screen would soon have to go blank. So this morning finds me a mouth-breather, in a state of perpetual squint. Taking out the empties, the sun came over Camelback Mountain like a thermonuclear bomb. I sneezed, and it felt like a pair of sledgehammers hitting me in the temples. Typing on this keyboard sounds like a bowling alley to my useless ears. Even the headline of the morning paper - U.S. Death Toll Tops 1,700 - failed to get a reaction from me, in part because I saw that cold statistic last night on Yahoo! news. So many things have happened since I last occupied this space that there is no way to address them... For instance, General Motors announced plans to eighty-six some 25,000 workers. That really should require my undivided attention, but there's this big distraction sitting in my gut like a rotten cabbage. I am helpless to deal with anything but that at this moment. I feel how you would feel if you were to learn that toothpaste is a cause of oral cancer. I feel how you would feel upon discovering that you were down to your last coffee filter, and all out of toilet paper besides. Is this symptomatic of a Grade AA Large hangover? Or am I just another Pistons fan? My Dad says not to worry. Ahead of time, he advised me not to get down on my favorite team even if they were to lose Game 2 to the San Antonio Spurs, which they did. He says our guys will be a different team, the team they are supposed to be, once they get back home. When Big Ben blows out the 'fro and the maniac fans make the building tremble with their own curious brand of boisterous behavior, they'll get their legs (and their shots) back. It just so happens that the Pistons are the only team to ever win the middle three games at home in the NBA Finals, and they did it just twelve months ago. They're also the only team to ever have won the middle three games on the road, back in 1990, when team architect Joe Dumars was out there in sneakers and shorts. If they can torch the Spurs for three straight - as my Dad, a shrewd bettor, thinks they will - the team will go back to that hangar they used to call the Alamo Dome with all the momentum necessary for a Game 6 clincher. But they sure haven't looked capable of any such heroics so far, and their spirits seem pretty low, the looks on their faces resembling the one most recently seen plastered on Mike Tyson's mug. Pistons fans everywhere are just sick about it. Maybe Detroit shot their wad against Shaq in that humid Game 7 in Miami last week. The Heat this year were a mirror image of last year's Lakers; they have two good players (one of them being the biggest in the game) and a bunch of nobodies, and the Pistons feast on that. The Spurs are different, a great team in their own right. They're talented in too many ways, with a roster full of veterans who have felt the pressure before, and have thrived in it. At this point, a Detroit comeback is a tall order. To repeat as champs, they'll have to make history, which is what they do. Wishful thinking? Of course it is. Will that get me through this demented haze of today? I hope so. I doubt it, though. It all goes back to another Michigan nugget: If you wish in one hand and shit in the other, which one gets full the fastest? Did you just groan, or was that me? Note to fellow Pistons sympathizer Web Guy, fresh off his vacation, who witnessed (and partook in) the slaughter in my living room last night: What were we thinking? And, by the way, thanks for the lunch money you left on my pool table. I'll let you know how it was after I throw it up: Pistons in six. Paul Heller 6/13/05 << back to the archives
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