Last night’s Mavericks-Lakers game gave me closure.

Just not the kind I expected.

I am excellent at not finishing books.

Truth told, I’m not great at making time to start them (though I’m pretty good at buying them with fantastic intentions). But I’m a plus-plus fail-to-finish-it guy.

Perhaps it’s my tilted inexperience at working through a complete book that fuels my awe at how novelists wrap things up. Like, not just the resolution, the denouement — but the actual choice of words after which to full-stop.

As I continue to work through what it is in my life and in my DNA that has made me such an over-the-top sports fan, I do wonder if part of what feels so unnatural about experiencing that final sentence in a book (when I do actually manage to reach that mountaintop) is that it’s so foreign to the literature that I choose regularly to get lost in, to lose my mind over, to love and hate and mourn, to live. A matchup, a ballgame, a series, a season.

Because there’s always a next one.

In the last few months, two of the teams that I have never not loved have, once and for all and quite unhappily, pushed me to contemplate whether I’ve just flipped a final page and closed a back cover.

Last night didn’t help.