12 Minutes (Warriors 36, Cavs 8)

Back when you were responsible for filling your iPod with music, the default “All Songs” view would sort itself alphabetically. Which meant that I spent quite a bit of time scrolling past (or clicking on) Madonna’s “4 Minutes”, featuring Justin Timberlake and Timbaland. In that song, the chorus states “We only got 4 minutes to save the world.” And while what the Golden State Warriors did in the fourth quarter to the Cleveland Cavaliers on Thursday can’t be qualified as saving the world, and definitionally took three times longer than 4 minutes, I refuse to be discouraged from using this as my intro to this post. After the desultory 36 minutes that preceded it, the 12 minutes the Warriors played in the fourth were inch perfect (and boy, did they need to be). Stifling defense and a vintage “save us, Steph” flurry bailed the Warriors out on a night where they absolutely deserved a loss. The final score of the game was 104-89, but the more shocking number was the fourth quarter tally: 36-8 in favor of the Warriors, flipping a 13 point deficit into a 15 point win. What a turnaround, what a comeback, what a win.

…