The burning sand had blistered the shambling man’s feet into mangled caricatures. The pervasive winds had tattered his clothes to mere shreds. Yet he continued his journey.
The vast, barren plains of the desert had nearly wiped every sane thought from his mind. The unrelenting sun had tormented his eyes for months, making hazy the line between the real and the imagined. Yet he continued his journey.
A meager, scavenged diet of reptiles and scrub-brush had left him in constant weariness. Total isolation had robbed him of the concept of humanity. Yet he continued his journey.
A flickering caught his gaze, but the man dismissed it as another mirage perpetrated upon him by the deceitful desert air. Unsteadily plodding through the ever-shifting sands, he continued forth in pursuit of his goal. Then, that flickering again. Clearer this time, its origins not in the ghostly hallucinations that haunted both his waking and dreaming, but in reality. Somehow, he found the strength to break into a trot. Then, as the object in the sand became more defined in the haze, the man began to run.
Digging frantically with his hands, the half-buried television was unearthed. On the screen, he could see what he had most desired these four months. Tears of pure, unfettered joy flowed freely from dust-caked eyes, leaving dirty tracks on the disheveled man’s cheeks. He clutched the TV, wide-eyed, almost not daring to believe what was unfolding before him.
It was back. They were back. The NBA was back.