On Oct. 19, 2018, I stood on the footbridge that feeds fans into the plaza area behind then-Miller Park’s center-field wall, looking back at the stadium that had gone weirdly quiet in the moments after the Milwaukee Brewers had won Game 6 of the National League Championship Series against the Los Angeles Dodgers.
I took a deep breath and allowed myself to capture the moment in my mind’s eye forever, thinking, “What an amazing time to be a Milwaukee sports follower. What a wonderful night. This might be as good as it gets right here, one game away from the World Series.”
It wasn’t fatalism. It was gratitude.
I’ve been a part of Wisconsin sports my whole life. I love it, but I I’m not naive to the heartbreak that has entailed.
Even proximity to a championship here is rare and edifying. We famously threw a parade in 1982 for the World Series runner-up Brewers that new generations of fans sometimes scoff at, because it wasn’t for a championship.
But you know what? We’d do it again.
That fall night in 2018 happened to be the same night that the Milwaukee Bucks played their first home game inside Fiserv Forum, the house that Giannis Antetokounmpo built.
The team’s win over the Indiana Pacers, momentous as it was, had to settle for second fiddle as the Brewers toppled the Dodgers, 7-2, less than five miles away, tying the NLCS at 3-3.
The Brewers didn’t have that breakthrough the next day. They lost Game 7.
The Bucks, though, had begun brewing something special.
Downtown Milwaukee’s night to shine
On July 20, 2021, I did the same thing. I stood near Pere Marquette Park on State Street and turned around to gaze back on a bustling Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, briefly glancing northwest toward the direction of Fiserv Forum.
I was returning from the Deer District, still a couple hours before it filled to delirious capacity for Game 6 of the NBA Finals, captured beautifully in images that make me appreciative of a championship in the era of drone cameras. I visited with friends at a bar and sampled the festival atmosphere that had wrapped its arms around this city.
I muttered to myself again, “This might be as good as it gets right here.”
I was wrong.
One of pro sports’ smallest markets triumphs
It’s been admittedly more fun than I expected watching New York lose its mind over the 2026 NBA championship for the Knicks, a long-suffering franchise that hadn’t won a crown since 1973. Scores of fans, strangers celebrating outdoors, unified by a generation of waiting.
As a Milwaukeean, I’ve grown mistrustful of big-city fan bases, even those that have the misfortune of following bumbling franchises like the New York Jets, New York Giants, Los Angeles Angels, Los Angeles Clippers, Brooklyn Nets, New York Mets, Chicago Bears (lol), etc.
Even most of those fans have seen a title in their lifetimes, and it feels like the big-city sports ecosystem has been trying to extract Antetokounmpo from this small market for years. But the joy Knicks fans have exhibited feels genuine.
And you know what else I love about it?
I love that we felt it first.
I know what it’s like to see my city come alive. To witness things that I immediately recognize will be remembered forever.
And I got to see it here, in one of pro sports’ smallest markets, with a generational, transcendent superstar who repeatedly chose to stay here with us longer.
Sure, we’re not New York or Los Angeles or even Miami. We’re constantly on the defensive as people like Stephen A. Smith take potshots at us in between his smirks and schtick and voice modulation. God forbid, we have a winter.
But what a perfect marriage we had between our big-little city and a wide-eyed underdog who grew up to become an alpha predator, carrying the Bucks franchise from modesty to the top of the mountain.
Everything about it was one-of-a-kind.
The teenager from Greece, drafted 15th overall, who came from the humblest of backgrounds to not only build himself into a dominant basketball player but also a leader, advocate and philosopher.
The 50 points in a Finals clincher to break a 50-year drought.
Kevin Durant’s foot on the line, the debilitating belief that a Giannis injury might knock him out for the rest of the postseason, Khris Middleton, the block, the alley-oop from Jrue Holiday.
Even the timing was unique, with a postseason running into July because of the disruptive COVID-19 pandemic. It created an unusual cathartic relief when we could finally gather in droves – perhaps with a lingering sheen of caution – to celebrate being together as much as we celebrated basketball.
It’s also one-of-a-kind because the next Bucks title, should Milwaukeeans be so lucky, won’t feature any players from the 2021 team.
Gone now is Giannis, off to be the sun in someone else’s southern sky.
Will there ever be another Giannis?
Would Fiserv Forum even be standing without Giannis? Probably. A financing package was approved in 2015, before Antetokounmpo had become an obvious superstar, even if the hints were there.
But the Deer District, the businesses around the stadium, the celebration of Bucks basketball around town … all of it feels like it was baked with Antetokounmpo among the chief ingredients.
The banner in the rafters: Impossible without him.
Maybe there’s a room for regret. That the Bucks could have won a second title with Giannis, that there’s certainly an avenue where he could have finished his storied career solely in the big-small town that helped raise him, that the more nationally celebrated market finally got their guy, at our expense.
Transcendent players and championships don’t grow on trees, and we’ll probably never see anything like him again in our lifetimes as Milwaukee sports fans.
It doesn’t have to be regret, though. It can be gratitude.
Two things can be true: Giannis really was as good as it gets, and I hope everyone had a chance to stand there and absorb that for a second. I think most people did.
We hope now we’re in a temporary holding pattern until we get to see something comparable again.
There’s heartbreak and frustration and confusion, but we’ll always have that sense of triumph and that moment when everything lined up perfectly for our hometown.
We felt that first.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Never forget how Giannis made our city, Milwaukee, come alive
Reporting by JR Radcliffe, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By JR Radcliffe, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel | USA TODAY Network
