The Super Bowl won’t help you get away from America. Get your politics out of my sports is an inane, impossible request, but it’s particularly absurd with regards to an entertainment that features field-sized flags, fighter jet flyovers, doofily solemn salutes to service, and, this particular year, a franchise owned, coached, and quarterbacked by personal friends of a President whose policies have choked airports and avenues with protesters and whose easy rage recalls both Mussolini on the balcony and a seven-year-old who’s skipped lunch. The NFL and its broadcast partners—Fox in particular—festoon the sport with miles of red, white, and blue bunting. Tune in for America’s Game of the Week, Football Night in America. Football is, you could say, a distinctly American carnage. And its biggest game functions, between the actual football, as a comment on gaudily grim American consumerism.

This doesn’t mean sports can’t be a vehicle for escape. The world carries on around you no matter what you’re doing, but there are times when athletic spectacle obliterates reality, and you are consumed by it: exultingly hopping up and down in your living room or a stadium aisle. It’s just difficult to get to that place when a game is taking extended regular breaks to dangle a flag-draped six pack in front of your face.

You know what’s easy? The NBA regular season. It’s a river you can bathe in as much or as little as you like. There’s too much of it, probably, but the surplus is welcome when you don’t know what to do with yourself on a Monday night and you’re looking for something to disappear into for a few hours. John Wall, in so many words, called Cavs-Wizards the biggest regular season game of his career, which is like picking the fiercest-looking kitten out of a lineup, but the silly seriousness fits. The Wiz are soaring. Who better to use as an altitude-clocking instrument than the defending champs? 

It turns out the Wizards can hang with the Cavs, if not quite overcome them. Wall came out intent to perforate Cleveland’s perimeter defense. He blew past Iman Shumpert, Kyrie Irving, whoever the Cavs threw at him, and found open shooters for threes and Marcin Gortat for dunks. What makes Wall a terror is the first step he uses to reliably beat defenders puts him in a spot on the court from which he can do just about anything. Striding toward the basket with some space in front of him, he’s capable of pulling up, finishing at the rim, kicking the ball out, or faking a move toward the basket and hitting a cutter in one motion. He scores and creates buckets as all great players do, but he also sows defensive panic. When Wall drives, it’s like the football field sprinklers going off in the middle of a pep rally.

As Wall tired, Bradley Beal began to assume dominion over the Wizards’ offense as both a secondary creator and a shooter of indiscriminate threes that poured in at precisely the right moments. Kevin Harlan blessed him with a Bradley Beal is an assassin! when he hit an overtime triple to put the Wizards up by two with 1:20 left in the overtime period. For the past two months, Beal has been the wingman Wall needs: spacing the floor, playing de facto backup point guard, and creating shots for himself when necessary. He finished the game with 41 points and eight assists.

This wasn’t enough, of course, because LeBron James set a career-high in dimes and hit a stupefying game-tying shot: hauling in a sixty-foot heave from Kevin Love, turning, and falling into the courtside seats as the ball banked off the glass and in. Then he fouled out early in the overtime period and Kyrie Irving, who had spent most of the game unsuccessfully trying to torch Wall, did that thing where he dribbles in four directions at once and sinks jumpers and lay-ins like he’s steering the ball through the hoop with his mind. Love, for his part, chipped in maybe the best performance of his Cleveland tenure: 39 points and 12 rebounds, including a 15-point third quarter that kept the Cavs in the game while the Wizards were surging and a clutch three late in the fourth quarter.

The game was great in part due to its frivolousness. It was a perfect Super Bowl chaser. There was no pomp or stakes or thudding narrative, just two teams pushing each other, launching a bunch of improbable shots that kept falling. I spent the end of the fourth quarter and most of the overtime standing up and making the sort of joyfully pained involuntary noises that happen when sports are doing a number on you. I figured Cavs-Wizards would be fun, but you can never anticipate when a game is going to become everything to you for a brief, blissful while. As the buzzer sounded and the Cavs high-fived each other, I fell back onto the couch and for a few seconds felt the feeling of falling asleep happy. Your eyelids close, and you are warm, and you drift off. The Wizards were less contented. John Wall resignedly dapped up LeBron and Bradley Beal pulled his jersey up over his face as he walked off the court, but they’ll know it soon: they could give the Cavs a hell of a playoff series in a few months.

Because, whatever, it’s an NBA regular season game in early February. Results aren’t important. The Wizards played beautifully and very nearly won. They learned what they needed to learn about themselves. What they provided in the process was wonderful to watch and about as purely useful as sports get. To be transported by something so low-stakes is a gift. It’s a relief to know that we have this thing that makes it possible to get away—from America, from our lives’ peculiar stresses, from ourselves—and that the escape can happen suddenly, on an unremarkable Monday night, when you need but scarcely expect it.