Crushed by loss? Time will tell for Magic

Last nights game was umm... something more than an embarrassment to Orlando. The entire game was filled with mistakes ... from the coach to the best player on the team missing 8 fucking FT. At the end of the game I realized ... it is in fact just a game. And those players are nothing more than Human!!! Here is a very good/ heart touching story of last nights game in case you missed it.


ORLANDO, Fla. -- He sat alone at his locker, his back turned away from everyone, barely saying a word to anybody for 10 minutes, then 10 more, then another 10, and then a few more.

Finally, when the Orlando Magic locker room had been cleared of all but the final stragglers, Dwight Howard rose slowly from his chair, walked over to a large mirror covering almost an entire wall, and looked into it. Silently.

Back to his locker he went to retrieve his light yellow dress shirt before he doubled back to the mirror, walked to within inches of it, and stared himself in the face.

Whatever he was thinking, whatever he was saying to himself, he kept to himself.

"Gonna be able to come back from that?" he was asked ever so gingerly when he returned to his stall.

"Why not?" Howard said.

Well, that was a pretty tough loss, came the obvious answer.

"So what?" Howard replied. "Life is tough."

Yes it is, and if anyone ever needs to reference one of the toughest losses a team has ever absorbed in an NBA Finals, they can go back and have a look-see at this one -- the loss that seems almost destined to go down in the annals of the Orlando Magic's history as the night they blew their chance at winning the franchise's first championship.

You know those 14-year-old nightmares starring Nick Anderson in Game 1 of the 1995 Finals that everyone around here references? They'll pale now in comparison to this, a night that will go down as a multilayered collapse of epic proportions, a night when missed free throws by Howard, a mistaken strategy by Stan Van Gundy and a mistimed emotional blowup by Mickael Pietrus were only a few of the major and minor things that combined to all but shatter the Magic's hopes of defeating the Los Angeles Lakers for the 2009 NBA title.

"That one will haunt me forever," Van Gundy said of his decision not to instruct the Magic to intentionally foul the Lakers when they inbounded with 11 seconds left, trailing by three, and got one of two super-clutch 3-pointers from Derek Fisher in a 99-91 overtime victory Thursday night that dropped the Magic into a 3-1 hole.

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