Game 7 was not pretty. After playing 12 times this season (5 in the regular season, 7 in this series), the Warriors and Rockets knew all each others’ habits and played gritty, grind-it-out basketball. Young Rocket Amen Thompson, he of the chiseled Sphinx features, turned Steph Curry’s usual beautiful game into a struggle for survival. I am reminded once again of the Vogons:

Billions of years ago, when the Vogons first crawled out of the primeval seas of Vogsphere, lay panting and heaving on the planet’s virgin shores… when the first rays of the young Vogsol sun had shone across them… it seemed as if the forces of evolution had simply given up on them then and there, turned aside in disgust and written them off as an ugly mistake. They would never evolve again. They shouldn’t have survived. The fact that they did is a testament to the thick-willed stubbornness of these creatures. Evolution? they said to themselves. Who needs it? What nature refused to do for them they simply did without until they were able to correct the gross anatomical inconveniences with surgery.

The natural forces of Vogsphere worked overtime to make up for their blunder. They brought forth scintillating jeweled scuttling crabs, which the Vogons ate, smashing them with large iron mallets; aspiring trees which the Vogons cut down to use the firewood for cooking the crabs; and elegant gazellelike creatures with dewy eyes which the Vogons would catch and sit on.

Fortunately Buddy Hield — the textbook definition of a streak shooter, who started the season hitting everything, then settled into an extended, frustrating slump, and had 0 points in Game 6 — chose this occasion to catch fire. He scored 22 badly needed points in the first half and 33 in the game, “the most points after going scoreless in [a] prior game in NBA postseason history,” says ESPN. Buddy gets the game ball.

Steph finally found some daylight in the 4th quarter and brought us home. Also playing well: Jimmy Butler, who apparently had been having some kind of identity crisis.

My message to my guys was I wasn’t being who I was. In a sense of pumping confidence into my guys. I think that’s a part of my leadership that I’ve learned and gained throughout my years of playing this game at a high level. I wasn’t doing that for the first six games, so I wanted to make sure to let them know that I was going to show everything was going to be fine, we’re right where we wanted to be and I think I got back to being who I’m supposed to be.

And how can I not mention Draymond, who after getting an early technical for whacking Fred Vanvleet in the face, mostly behaved himself and was a big part of holding the Rockets under 90 points.

Those of us who were scarred by the Dubs blowing a 3–1 lead over Cleveland in the 2016 Finals can now breathe a sigh of relief. We get exactly one day off before the start of the series against Minnesota, which promises to be hard-fought. There will probably be a lot of this:

And hopefully not so much of this:

But we’ll see, we’ll see. Anything is possible.