I missed most of the first quarter. I had walked into the city from the near west side, pausing for a minute to take a pull from a flask and admire the fog hovering over the still and vacant Chicago River, and caught a southbound train traveling through Beverly, where my girlfriend lived when her hair was still corn tassel blonde and she went to school at a converted nunnery, through Tinley Park, where an Applebee’s waiter once advised me not to order the riblets, and stopping in Orland Park: a winding gnarl of strip malls and subdivisions with names like Eagle Ridge and Golfview Estates. It’s a suburb, unremarkable wilderness flattened by concrete and asphalt, that exists only because white fear and money exist. People choose to live here and yet no one seems to want to.

I’m between a fake Christmas tree and my girlfriend’s father, pattering idly about Mark Wahlberg’s disaster movie fetish and the ‘92 Bulls’ bench rotation, with most of my mind on Kyrie Irving, who’s audaciously and unsuccessfully trying to make a point about Steph Curry by taking increasingly difficult jumpers over Klay Thompson. My girlfriend’s brother asks me why they’re called Golden State, and mid-explanation—it’s on the words beautifully whimsical—I realize it’s a question posed out of boredom, a desire to make noise rather than seek an answer, and that we’re both annoyed by me talking about linguistic aesthetics and 1970s basketball history I’m only passingly familiar with. I’m suffering him and he’s suffering me. I stop short: they used to be called San Francisco, but they play in Oakland now. In my right ear, two cousins perhaps just today learning of Kevin Durant’s offseason defection to the Warriors, are debating his manhood as he pulls up a few feet short of DeAndre Liggins and nails a three.

I tend to hang around the women at these holiday gatherings. Their put-on politeness is like a toothache, but they listen and gossip. If they get drunk enough, they confide in you. The men talk at each other, windily opinionating about nothing in particular. Half of them fall asleep after dinner. But I want to watch the game, so this is my company for the next two hours. 

These Warriors are mythic in real time, which is to say they’re interesting primarily in the abstract. No matter whether they win the next four NBA titles or none at all, this team will be a repository for basketball thought for decades, or at least argued about in bars for a very long time, but they don’t have much to do as the league enters its winter doldrums, and there’s even less to be said about them. Durant has fit in about as well as anyone could have hoped. They blow out most of their opponents by the end of the third quarter and beat some of them before tipoff. They lack frontcourt depth, but anyone vexed about that is either an extreme neurotic or a sportstalk radio host trying to cobble together a third hour. 

So it’s a rare and blessed thing when the Warriors don’t seem like an inexorable force, when the ball stops moving in the fourth quarter and Durant, who’s been playing with an angry verve, assumes dominion over the offense and comes up short because Irving does the same thing at the other end of the floor but finally starts converting off some of those strained, twisting moves he’s been throwing at Klay Thompson all afternoon. It’s thrilling, not necessarily to see the Warriors fail, but to see them fully present in the story that until now has felt like a thing that’s trailing them, the cloud and the deafening sound a rocket ship farts out as it leaves the earthbound behind. It’s thrilling to see them work and struggle and screw up and have something to learn from. And then there is the pleasure of two great basketball teams pushing each other, a game-winning fadeaway jumper from the elbow as the clock ticks down, a tense bungled last-second out-of-bounds set. These things aren’t complicated or mysterious.

After the buzzer sounds, I wade into the kitchen, into stories I’ve heard two or three times, inside jokes I don’t get, political commentary I won’t touch, impenetrable small talk, travelogues that scan like lists of tourist destinations in cities I haven’t been to. I coast along the top of this conversation and after a while I’m dulled and aggravated. It gets dark and we eat and I realize I’m not going to have an emotionally honest moment today. This bothers me a lot. I run out the clock on the evening drying dishes and nodding along as one of the cousins tells me about her nutritionist’s degree, little cartoon squiggles of rage dancing above my ears.

My girlfriend and I are at the train station, passing a beer back and forth, and I’m aggrieved when I should be relieved, grousing about something that’s already over. You did get to watch the game, though, she says. And I stop complaining, because I should and because the game really was entertaining. Yeah, sorry. That was fun, I say. I shut up and let her nap on my shoulder while we rode north through Tinley Park and Beverly toward downtown Chicago and the air was pleasantly cold as we walked home gabbing and joking and munching on pretzels we picked up at the CVS. That was the second, last good thing that happened on Christmas.