I have mentioned here before that I prefer regular season baseball to playoff baseball. It largely comes down to the fact that I prefer the daily routine and ritual of following a team, a sport, across a 162-game series, to the high-pressure game-by-game pressure cooker of the playoffs.

A baseball regular season is a narrative with a long arc and many different chapters and characters. Highs and Lows. Comedy and Drama. There is little in the way of Tragedy, because there is always a next game and a next start.

Playoff baseball is Tragedy writ large. There is enough of that in the world already.

The end of the baseball regular season this year came much harder upon me than in past years. I blame the Madness that is Trump. I could not imagine 6-month of cold and MAGA B.S. without the daily rhythm and narrative of baseball.

Finally, I asked my friend Mr. Chat GPT for help in finding something similar to get me by. One of the obvious suggestions it gave right away was investing in the NBA season. The suggestion struck me as so damn obvious that I could not believe that I had not thought of it myself.

Basketball has always been my second favorite sport. It is also the ssport I played growing up and single sport that I feel like I can say I most understand from the “inside-out.”

With that, I purchased the NBA League Pass and will be following the NBA games for the 25/26 season. A daily ritual and routine that I am hoping will get me through this upcoming, dark winter without baseball.

My working plan with ClimbingSky at this point is to check-in occasionally with NBA-related posts here over the next 6-months. But since the NBA game is a Digital experience by nature, and not the Analog experience of the MLB game, I am not exactly sure what the posts here will look like. But for me that will be part of the fun.

If you are not an NBA fan, forgive me this diversion. If you are an NBA fan, I hope you will not be disappointed with the direction and character of my posts.