You’ll Tell Your Grandkids About Steph Curry’s Historic And Unforgettable Performance In Game 4

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It still doesn’t seem real the day after. Similar to when you drink too much during the craziest night of your life, but you aren’t really sure if you’ve reached nirvana or gotten arrested until you wake up at ground zero of the wildest bacchanal in history.

There are still vestiges of Steph Curry coming up two feet short on his first deep ball Monday night. It was the initial moment where his explicit mortality sorta freaked viewers out, as if they had ironically forgotten during his two-week sabbatical for the knee sprain that he was still just a person. But then we all looked at that boyish face and remembered he’s not some ethereal force; if you reach out your hand, he’ll slap you five and you’ll feel it. In any dramatic story, you need an antagonist and a fall, and Steph’s first half against Damian Lillard and C.J. McCollum felt like just that, with his first 3-point attempt merely the transition into the second act’s narrative plunge.

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Steph did hit a couple of shots in the mid-range during that initial quarter, but that air ball from 30 feet felt cruel, like he no longer whisked the waters of Hippocrene from his forehead.

But at the end of the game, well past 1 a.m. ET, you weren’t so sure the whole thing hadn’t been some movie dreamed up in a writer’s room where they’re encouraged to fly right into the sun — wax wings be damned. Because Steph’s Game 4 wasn’t real, or at least it didn’t feel like it in the moment. It still flits at the edges of our memory until we watch the highlights and see the tweets and remember, “Yeah, we watched history being made.”

It’s always rare to feel history being made because we’re so bombarded with the trivial every day. Every moment seems as inconsequential as the last. It’s rarer still that you’re witnessing history and lucid of that fact at the same time; knowing that, as something’s unfolding, you know it will play a prominent role when you recount the story of your life. Usually it just happens and it’s so fast and unexpected you don’t have time to reflect. Steph’s 40-point Game 4 was similarly spontaneous, and while it mostly occurred in the fourth quarter and an extra five minutes of basketball that might personify that over-used word, “clutch,” it still allowed viewers some brief moments of reflection. Enough to know they were actively participating in a historic moment.

It was enough time to know that we all want to capture the essence of Monday night’s game in a bottle, so we can uncork it when we’re feeling blue and breathe in whatever Steph sorcery inspired such magnificence. Because things were looking blue for Steph after he spent the first three quarters going 0-for-9 from long range.

But the later brilliance was only buttressed by how off he seemed through the first 36 minutes of the game. The Steph fans remembered from this historic MVP season returned in the fourth quarter, when he hit that first outside shot — a long 2-pointer to whet the appetite. After that shot, we all saw Steph gesturing to an imaginary wristwatch while he addressed the Moda Center crowd. He was telling a nervous Blazers fan base, it’s almost time. Curry’s foreshadowing is apparent in hindsight; he knew of the incoming onslaught, but the rest of us did not.

From there, it was only a coronation. Like Steph, we should have predicted what was to come, but everyone except Steph was just frazzled by the theatricality of it all. We were all agog and at a loss for words. And all the signs were there for the rush of buckets, too.

Steph was skipping along the hardwood instead of crashing down with every stride on that banged up knee and tweaked ankle. The ebullience that personifies Steph’s bliss on the court returned, and it became fun again. That’s about when any hope the Blazers might stun the world and advance to the next round ended. It was still long before the final whistle shrilled in overtime.

We’ll show you the highlights, that’s what we do, but the ending had already been written after he hit that long, step-back 2-pointer.

Next came his first real triple:

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…then another.

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Those first 3-pointers bookended him showing off that alien handle on a pick-and-roll before he flung an unreal left-handed cross-body pass to Draymond for the dunk.

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Steph had returned; it only took three quarters — and a tip of the cap to the ejected Shaun Livingston — to go from injured also-ran on a 25-minute time limit, to glimmering all-world MVP.

Overtime was merely his re-introduction back into our imaginations. He scored an NBA-record 17 points in the extra session; that’s “NBA” record — both postseason and the regular season. Those 17 points were two more than the entire Blazers team scored in the extra session, and two more than the Raptors and Heat combined for in their overtime period earlier Monday night.

After this penultimate three (he added one more for good measure), Steph kindly let the shattered Trail Blazers fans know what had just happened:

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The win felt beside the point. The wonder had returned. Steph Curry, the two-time MVP, is back. Steph Curry, the world breaker, is back. The mystical 2015-16 NBA season will continue, unabated. A possible Western Conference Finals epic and NBA Finals rematch are back to dancing and whirling in our imagination.

Except, after the fireworks in Portland on Monday night, it’s getting awful hard to separate fantasy from reality.

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