Thirty-Two Before Anybody Finished Lunch

Tip was 12:30 in the afternoon. By 12:42 the thing everybody had spent two days arguing about was already irrelevant.

That is not a figure of speech. Atlanta scored thirty-two points in the first quarter of an elimination game. On Monday night in San Francisco, across forty full minutes, they scored fifty-five. More than half of a playoff game's worth of offense arrived before most of the building had finished whatever it brought in with it.

The Dream beat Golden State 80-69. The series is 3-3. There is a Game 7 on Saturday night, and there would not have been one at about one o'clock this afternoon if any of this had gone the other way.

### The part I got wrong was the part I was most sure of

This morning I wrote about the flyer with the city seal on it, the rapper who declared a paid holiday, the blue shirts on every seat. And I closed by drawing a line around all of it — that none of the apparatus fixes the basketball, that a full room has never once made a jump shot go in.

That line is still true and it was still the wrong thing to be confident about. Because the shots went in.

Monday, Atlanta shot nineteen of sixty-five. Six threes on twenty-six attempts. This afternoon: twenty-seven of sixty-two, and thirteen of thirty from distance. Eight more makes on three fewer tries, and more than twice as many threes. The room did not do that. But I spent two days writing about the room, which meant I spent two days not writing about the possibility that a team shooting twenty-nine percent might simply stop.

### Allisha Gray never took the question seriously

She told us so on Wednesday, and I printed it this morning without quite hearing it.

"We are locked in on winning Game 6 whether it's 8am, 10pm, midnight. We got a championship to win."

Then she went eight-for-twelve. Five of seven from three. Twenty-three points, six rebounds, three blocked shots in thirty-two minutes, and a plus-thirteen. Every other person in this story — the mayor, the arena, the people who moved a wrestling show around, me — treated the hour as a problem to be solved. The player who had to go out and play at that hour treated it as a sentence she had already finished.

Rhyne Howard gave her twenty-one on six-of-eleven, four-of-six from the arc, five-of-five at the line, and picked up her sixth foul doing it. Between them, Gray and Howard scored forty-four of the eighty and went nine-for-thirteen from three. The other five women who played went four-for-seventeen out there. Make of that what you want on Saturday.

### What it cost, and what it did not settle

Seven players logged minutes. Seven. Brionna Jones, Te-Hina Paopao and Matilde Villa were all listed out, and Karl Smesko went the rest of the way with a rotation you could seat at a dinner table.

Angel Reese had fourteen rebounds and six assists and a plus-ten, and she also went five-for-eighteen with six turnovers. Both of those are true and the second one is the kind of thing that decides a Game 7. Atlanta got outscored 43-34 in the second half and won by eleven anyway, which tells you the afternoon was decided before halftime, 46-26, and then survived.

Golden State's largest lead was two points. All afternoon. They shot thirty-one percent and Gabby Williams took twenty-two shots to get her twenty-six, and none of that is going to happen again in the same combination on their own floor.

### The number that actually answered the mayor

Seventeen thousand and ninety-nine, announced. That is the same announced figure State Farm Arena reported for Game 3 on a Wednesday night and Game 4 on a Saturday afternoon. A 12:30 Thursday did not cost a single announced seat against either of them.

I want to be careful here, because I was careful about it this morning and I am not going to get loose about it now that the result is pleasant. That is a sellout number, not a turnstile count, and the Finals open a bigger configuration of this building than the rounds before it. What it is not is ambiguous. The city was asked to do an inconvenient thing on short notice and it filled the same room it fills at night.

That was the half of this anybody could act on before noon. It got done.

### Saturday

Game 7 is eight o'clock Saturday night at Chase Center. Atlanta is 1-2 in that building this series — they won Game 2 and lost Games 1 and 5, and Game 5 is the nineteen-of-sixty-five I have now mentioned twice because it is the version of this team that shows up in San Francisco.

Nobody is going to pass out a flyer in Atlanta on Halloween night asking anyone for permission to watch. They will not need to, and it would not help if they did. Whatever happens at Chase Center happens somewhere a mayor cannot reach, in front of a room that wants the opposite thing, and the only people who can do anything about it are the seven or so who are dressed.

They have been outplayed in that building twice and they have won there once. This afternoon only bought them the chance to go find out which one it is.