That's right.  Fuck the guilt.  Fuck the foul.  Fuck the way this whole shitty situation been spun by every 2-cent commentor and columnist who always hated the Spurs anyway.  Fuck it all.

I honestly turned off the TV immediately after Horry's foul, and refused to even LOOK at any basketball related article, picture, or web-page until a few hours before Game 5.  I knew there would be a shit-storm over Horry's foul.  I knew he'd probably be suspended.  What I did not know was that Stoudemire and Diaw would be joining him on the no-show list.  

So I spent today, the day after Game 5, reading every stupid article from FreeDarko to Steve Kerr, and almost nowhere did I find anyone who had any sense of balance about the situation.  Nobody bothered to notice that the Spurs had been indisputably raped by the refs in the last four minutes of Game 4.  Duncan, Parker, and Ginobili all got badly and obviously fouled on drives to the basket in the closing minutes, and nary a whistle was heard.  ...but Steve Nash trips over his own feet and Duncan picks up his fifth foul despite literally not touching him.  The Spurs should still have been able to pull it out despite the refs, but the refs' mistakes were the primary reason the Suns were able to close in to begin with.  If you have it on Tivo or DVR, go back and watch again... the Suns got the benefit of EVERY bad call and bad no-call that quarter.  

So, yeah, a frustrated Horry gives an unnecessarily hard hit to a player already moving a full speed, and Nash doesn't skimp on the acting job... not that he even needed to.  If Nash chooses to bounce up, it's a flagrant 1 and Horry gets a fine.  A little time spent wincing on the ground earns him a flagrant 2 and maybe gets Horry suspended.  But, just a little more writhing against the scorers table by Nash, and Bell rushes Horry, Stoudemire and Diaw jump off the bench, and next thing you know, David Stern is flying in like Demento Superman to see just how he can fuck up the situation even worse than it already was.

But, in keeping with my theme, fuck Game 4.  It's over.  Water under the burning bridge.  The Spurs have lost and won more than one 5-on-8 game before, and they'll lose and win more in the games to come.  Doesn't fucking matter.  Games can't be won by the whistle, they can only be lost.  It's never because of the refs when it's your team on top, is it?  

The Suns take Game 4 at a pyhrric cost, and the  following days coverage of these media darlings is so fawning that you start expecting tornado and tsunami victims to start sending sympathy letters to pampered multi-millionares.  The Spurs, by contrast, get multiple bomb-threats called in at the hotel they're staying in. (And no, I'm not making that last part up.)

...So the Spurs went into game 5 with a huge paper advantage, and everyone in the country was ready to spit and piss on them for having the nads to even show up at the Arena.  Barkley said they played guilty... and he wasn't wrong.  But I think it's more accurate to say that they didn't want to play period.  It wasn't just their worst quarter of the series or the playoffs; it was the worst quarter they've played for more than a year.  This heartless, soulless, cold-as-ice, thuggish machine called the Spurs couldn't seem to muster the will to play against the wrongly depleted Suns.  These Spurs, these foul characters cast as dirty cheating ruffians, didn't seem to want to even be in a match so ill-conceived.  

Such ignobility cannot be ignored, right?

Credit the Suns for playing hard.  If they hadn't come out of the gate so fast, the Spurs might not have woken up at all.  If the score had been 14-13 after one period instead of 24-13, the boys in black might have stayed in their stupor.  Make no mistake... in the first half, the Spurs were almost ready to lay down and give this game away.

But that doesn't last for long.  The analogy has been made before that these athletes are our modern day gladiators.  Once the blood gets flowing, it's hard to stop or even slow down.  Giving the game away would almost certainly mean giving the series away, and no man who has the requisite drive to make it to the NBA is going to give that up just because any number of bottom rung journalists think it might make for a better story.

So fuck it all.  Fuck the popular version.  Fuck the good stories.  Fuck the fuzzy feel-good righteous underdog crap.  I haven't forgotten Manu's black eye.  I haven't forgotten Barbosa undercutting Parker on drives and jumpers.  I haven't overlooked Nash complaining on every damn play, and I haven't gone without noticing Raja Bell making Ginobili look like an amateur at the art of flopping.  I'm not going to ignore Kurt Thomas fouling Duncan every other play, and I'm not going to ignore Stoudemire's whining stupidity.  I'm not going to lay down and pretend that the Suns are the only team that's ever have a few bad breaks go against them.

I'm gonna max out my credit card, and I'm going to get some damn good seats for tomorrow's game.  I'm going to scream at every call, good and bad, against SA - and I'm going to scream every epitaph I can think of against every goddamn orange jersey I see.

I'm a mother-fuckin Spurs fan, dammit.