I walked into this one with a half-formed thought that tonight might feel ordinary. The lights were low, the world outside already distant. I expected routine plays and familiar routines. That is human expectation. Basketball often refuses it.

From tip-off there was something different. Not drama at first. Just motion that felt like a whisper before it climbed into awareness. Two teams, each with its own weight of story. Portland trying to stitch together rhythm through injury and attrition. Golden State trying to remind itself of continuity after stumbling through the dog days of January. Both carrying momentum that did not want to be explained yet. Both wanting something from the night.

If this game were a song, it would be “Full Stop” by Radiohead.

The track does not drive forward. It pulses like an idea you cannot shake. It loops, it insists, it occupies the space you are in as if it has lived there all along. There is no resolution in it. Only persistence. Only presence.

That was this night.

Golden State opened the game like a force recollecting itself. They moved with a kind of calm violence that felt practiced, as if each motion had come from memory and muscle rather than impulse. The first quarter unfolded with an early 26-point edge in points in the paint, a statement written without statement. Their pressure did not scream. It settled. Portland’s defense tried to answer, but the air around the Warriors felt thicker, more authoritative.

The crowd heard the rhythm before they saw it on the board. By halftime it was clear: the Warriors were not merely leading. They were in command. The Trail Blazers fought. They pushed. Portland has fight. They have heart. But in this game the current slipped through their fingers before they realized it was already leaving them behind.

Golden State’s ball movement was quiet but exact. They assisted more than they scored themselves, an ensemble refusing ego for orchestration. Stephen Curry’s shooting night may have read modest on the stat sheet, but his 11 assists were a different kind of presence, the subtle insistence of connection, the insistence that this song was not just going to play itself.

What happened here was not a collapse. It was a loop finding its center. The Warriors scored early. They kept scoring. Portland adjusted, tried to edge back in, but every time the Blazers climbed toward relevance, Golden State met them with the same quiet answer: movement, connection, patience.

This is where “Full Stop” feels alive.

The song does not let you walk away until you have felt every repetition, every arresting beat that makes you realize you have been inside something deeper than rhythm. You see it not when it begins, but when it ends, and even then it stays with you.

By the time the final numbers were recorded, the scoreboard read 119-97. Warriors. Trail Blazers. A decisive margin. They built a lead that bloomed early and never retreated. Not because Portland quit. Not because they lacked heart. But because some nights refuse to yield their secrets until they have carried every participant through their cadence. The Warriors lived inside that cadence longer. They translated it into control.

When it was over, the lights in the room did not feel brighter. The quiet did not evaporate. The feeling remained. The sense that basketball is sometimes less about peaks and valleys and more about the slow pulsations between them. Possessions that feel like breath. Runs that feel like tides. Performances that feel like gravity.

This game did not end with a bang.
It ended with a pattern completed.

119 to 97 felt not like a margin, but like a sentence finished.

The screen went dark.
The night stayed alive.

And somewhere inside the calm that followed,
“Full Stop” was still playing.

Until next time…

-The Poet.