In Search of Dame Time

Remembering moments of my life that the Blazers legend made special.

It’s December 19, 2014. A Friday. I live in Santiago, having moved there a year earlier to work at a global research institute whose regional offices are based at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. I am at the apartment of a Chilean friend who I met during the year I spent “studying” abroad in Valparaíso. A group of us are sitting around the dining room table playing the dice game Dudo. It’s the same group of friends that I made during that wonderful junior year of college seven years earlier, a group that had mostly come up from Puerto Montt to study in Valpo and then had migrated, as many Chileans did, to work and live in Santiago. A friendship that we forged through late nights bar-and-club hopping while flanked by street dogs, drinking and smoking on the public transit turned party buses on our way back to Viña as the first light of dawn peeked out from the shanty covered hills. A set of pisco and Coca-cola bottles loom over the dice scattered on the table; our weekend outings having now been replaced by all-nighters at this apartment. It’s close to 1am and, out of habit, I check my phone for the score of the basketball game. The Blazers are playing the reigning champions, Spurs, in San Antonio. The same team that had beat them in the Conference semi-finals, four games to one, the previous season. It is Damian Lillard’s third year. By that point he’s already made a name for himself by being Rookie of the Year, and then by hitting a buzzer-beating, series-clinching bomb against the Houston Rockets in the first round of the playoffs his sophomore year. Every Blazers fan, and most NBA fans, can tell he is special, but he hasn’t yet reached the superstar status that he would later achieve. My phone shows that the game is tied 97-97, and that the fourth quarter has just ended. Overtime. I mention this to the group, and sheepishly propose turning it on. They reluctantly agree, and we all sit on the couch to watch it on ESPN (Chilean cable packages are great, by the way), where we will be treated for almost an hour to a wild back-and-forth slugfest that extends into the three overtimes. I do not remember if there was popcorn, but it feels like there was. None of them are very familiar with either of the teams or any of the players, but they soon start to ask about the guy wearing the number 0. “It’s the letter O, for Oakland, where he’s from. And Ogden, where he went to college. And now Oregon,” I say excitedly. He is putting on one of those transcendent clutch performances he will soon become famous for. The ones where you just slap your forehead and think, “How?!” The kind where even the casual viewer can tell that that one individual is different from the rest of the freak athletes around him; undeniably special. He had scored the final eight points of regulation and forced overtime with a drive and acrobatic finish with less than two seconds left on the clock, and followed that up with a block on Danny Green at the other end. He then forces double overtime with a three pointer with 13 seconds left. In the second overtime, as the Spurs start to look tired, he gets past his man to throw down a monster dunk. And then, to top it all off, he just absolutely takes over in the third overtime, hitting ridiculous shot after ridiculous shot to put the game away. A classic Dame performance. The only thing missing was his trademark tap of the wrist after a game winning play; something he would unveil the following week during a 40-point game against the Thunder that the Blazers would come from behind to win. Throughout the game, this group of friends who do not care about basketball are hooting and hollering, biting their nails with every possession, holding their breath with the arc of every three pointer, high fiving after another forced overtime. Dame ends the game with 43 points, a career high, which is funny to think about in retrospect for a player that would end up scoring 71 points in 39 minutes. A year later, I would leave Chile, a time of my life where I would not stay in one spot for more than two years. I wonder if they still remember that night like I do.