Hope hurts

In which the Liberty poison us with promise

Lynx 90 - Liberty 85

You know when you’re playing one-on-one with a kid, how you have to make special rules in order to keep things interesting? The grown-up can only shoot left-handed, the grown-up can only shoot while standing on one foot, etc.?

Today in Minnesota, the Liberty decided — by the kind of unconscious agreement that the Liberty’s many therapist-fans should get to work on analyzing — that the Lynx would get two or sometimes three attempts for every one of ours. It is therefore no surprise that we lost. The surprise, and the torment, is that we nearly won.

Some notes from a game that started as a blowout and ripened into a heartbreaker:

Sabrina — after a habitually dreadful first half — had the best quarter that any Liberty player has had this season. It was, for the Sabrina-skeptical among us (we were starting grumpily to assemble in that second quarter), a startling, mind-melting performance. She scored as many as the entire Lynx team. She wove through traffic like Kobe. She hit textbook midrange pull-ups like Jordan. She drained 3’s like Steph. She stole the ball repeatedly; whipped it through traffic to Stewie; nearly stole an inbounds pass and then roared in frustration and sheer excess dominance. More of this please.

Stewie hit a couple of 3’s — another premise-shatterer! — and was generally the flexible webbing holding our defense together in Leo’s absence. I want her please for the love of god to play thirty or fewer minutes tomorrow in Toronto.

JJ’s double-double machine rumbled on. But her fouls. I don’t know whether the fault lies with her or with the refs’ inability to forgive her for her size, but just when the game was becoming ours, she squelched things by giving up a 3-point play — which she immediately compounded by picking up a tech (unless Han really did do something outrageous that the camera missed?). Another dubious foul against her led DeMarco to get a tech, putting the game further out of reach.

Johannes, for the first time in weeks, found her state of semi-conscious net-magnetism. She was far from innocent when it came to allowing Kayla McBride’s decisive barrage, but — given our desperate need for offense — DeMarco made the right decision in keeping her out there.

Astier played, despite whatever she did to her ankle against the Wings, but she was, for one of the only times this season, a net negative. She had four turnovers, including one from out of bounds with eight seconds left. The play I’ll remember, though, is when she accidentally knocked Miles to the ground and then immediately tried to help her up. And Miles, ignoring Astier’s outstretched hands, shifted on her butt and let a teammate help her up instead (karma immediately punished her petulance with two missed free throws). This was one of the many moments in the afternoon when my ancient and profound dislike for the Lynx rumbled to life like the island in Widow’s Bay.

Speaking of which: can I scream into a pillow for a second about that $^#%ing broadcast? Did the camera-person think we were hoping to paint a portrait of Lindsay Whalen? Did we need a mini-documentary about the legend of Cheryl Reeves and her assistants? Was Kayla McBride making an obnoxious face at Johannes’ back really such a masterstroke? The feeling, for much of the game, was of sitting in on a parent-teacher conference for someone else’s infuriatingly precocious and beloved child.

I feel slightly better now.

Which is good, because I’m about to recall the brief but piercing in-game tragedy that was the Betnijah Laney-Hamilton minutes. Four of her last six outings — the ones she’s played in — have resulted in zero points. At one point she turned the ball over and then trudged back like the kid who can’t believe the PE teacher is making them do another lap of the gym. The prime objection to trading her, among the fanbase, seems to be that it would be cruel. Well, putting her on the court right now is feeling pretty cruel too. Please, Kolb, pull a 3 & D guard out of your hat.

And that, give or take a few-dozen ill-timed offensive rebounds by the Lynx, is how we sunk further into the muck of the middle-tier. (I should say, incidentally, that I am not one of these fans who cares desperately about the standings. So far as I can tell, we don’t play notably better at home than we do on the road, and we don’t do any worse against the top teams than against the middling ones. Which is to say that I would far rather go into the playoffs healthy than highly seeded. Though, knowing us, we will almost certainly pull off the trick of going into the playoffs both hurt and poorly seeded.)

Off, in horrifyingly few hours, to face the Tempo — who make us look like the picture of health.