THE OREGONIAN

On the bright side, this is such a cleaner method of losing. Just succumb to the superior team like a shack to a tsunami.

There’s none of that collapse stuff, no messy business of blowing 15-point leads at the brink of glory. You don’t have to listen to smart alecks say you had the talent but not the throat or have nosy neighbors wonder what happened to you.

You just shoot 72% in the first quarter and still lead only by four, wait for the assist-heavy wave of the better basketball team, lose by some nondescript score like 106-88 and voila. No pesky media questions, no one-year retrospectives, no tantalizing REM dreams about how you really won only to wake up to another visit from that old no-you-didn’t hangover.

It’s so very painless.

This way, nobody will remember. You’ll get two lunkheads sitting at Staples Center within one year with one asking the other whom the Lakers beat in the first round in 2001 and the other saying, “Um, I don’t know, might have been Phoenix.” There’s no speculation in a demanding society about where your exhibit should go in the Choke Museum relative to the ’99 Vikings or the ’96 Greg Norman.

That’s such inconvenience, all that stuff.

Far better to trail by a lot on merit at halftime, trail by a lot on merit throughout the third quarter, trail by a lot on merit throughout the fourth quarter and trail by a lot on merit at the end. Fall behind, fling up a bunch of underdog’s jump shots and go home. It’s more systematic. You don’t take up so much of everybody’s spring.

You just lose Game 1 with a fourth-quarter sinkhole that hints you aren’t championship material, wait around for four days with the NBA’s preposterous playoff schedule, endure at least 678 annoying references to whether Michael Jordan is coming back, then retake the floor for Game 2.

On a telltale play, the upstart, $89.7-million Trail Blazers scored on a gorgeous lob from Damon Stoudamire to Rasheed Wallace. The latter dunked and emitted a guttural bellow audible 10 rows up, clearly elated with his prowess. Of course, he barely had finished his scream when Robert Horry’s inbound lob reached its receiver, Rick Fox, ahead of the laggard Trail Blazer defense for a dunk 21 seconds before halftime.

The game grew indistinguishable from a slew of other NBA eye-glazers, save for the Trail Blazers making their usual case as a civic embarrassment with ejections, dejections and flagrant fouls, but even that isn’t particularly notable anymore. People kind of expect such petulance of the Trail Blazers when they buy tickets. It’s part of the circus.

The unfairness is, people will say the Trail Blazers did not improve from 2000 to 2001. That is just such negativism. They did too do us favors. They didn’t haul us all the way to June before showing us they didn’t have it.