. . . and now, you may exhale.

The Utah Jazz are in the Western Conference finals.

My game-watching avoidance behavior has reached what seems to be an outer limit of what you can call "watching the game." Maybe I could watch if I were in a darkened room with no one else in it to hear me screaming. As it is, I hear bulletins from the other room ("Jeez! Try getting back, why don't you?!?" was one such bulletin tonight), check in occasionally on nba.com, try to keep myself busy. I apparently truly believe that this will help the Jazz. I don't know--it's working so far. You can all thank me when you see me. I don't know how I'll be able to stand the conference finals. I think we should hire a shaman to cleanse the arenas of bad auras and stuff. Burn sage sticks. Circumambulate the hall. Exorcise the place. I personally am going to try to exorcise the demonic Tim Duncan from his super-egoistic position in my world view. Also, I am going to stop hating Manu "the Flopper" Ginobli. Maybe. Maybe that will help.

My grandson also wore his tiny little Jazz jersey for the first time. I'm pretty sure that had to be good luck.