When I was a kid my dad would take me to Pacers games. This was in the era of Reggie Miller — an endlessly clutch Hall-of-Famer who had a three point shot that looked like it came from the future. I remember vividly a game against the Nets where we were down three in the last seconds of the fourth and Reggie drew up from far outside the three-point line, fired a shot right before the buzzer, and drained it. 

I remember it so well because seeing it all come down to one improbable moment, the whole game distilling itself into one shot, and seeing that shot land…. it felt like pure magic. It’s a feeling I still chase to this day; for a few months in 2019, I would catch it every time I watched Team Liquid play Counter-Strike.

From 2016 to 2018, Team Liquid CS was the epitome of “almost.” We were cursed with what felt like a not-quite-Midas Touch, everything we reached for turned to silver. Whether it was through a heartbreaker loss that gave Coldzera the clutch of the century, or any of the many grand finals in 2018 where Liquid turned to Chokequid. Part of the problem was that, for as good as Liquid was, we were living in another team’s era.

Astralis was a clinical Danish powerhouse that won by simply playing the game smarter, better, and more consistently than anyone else — Liquid included.

They were one of the most successful teams in CS history, but they were also a little boring. That’s subjective, of course,  because if you loved the game, you had to appreciate the cleverness with which Astralis played it; they knew the default starting positions teams held so well that they had numerous molotov and multi-grenade setups that could kill an enemy player before the round even started. You had to respect the savviness it took for them to bring an artillery shell into a CS game. But after a while of them winning, the cunning just wasn’t that visually appealing.

During this era, Liquid was their foil. Liquid came from the underdog region (NA) and won a lot of their matches off of heater headshots and multikill clutches. This was not to say Liquid’s strategies or utility was bad, or that Astralis’s players couldn’t shoot — you can’t crack the top 2 without having brain and brawn. 

More, this is all to say that Liquid was electric in the server in a way that was pretty similar to how Reggie Miller was electric on the court. At their peaks: fast, accurate, confident, clutch. 

They’re also comparable for their legacies off the court. Reggie Miller was one of the greats in a time where he’d be overshadowed by two of the greatest ever: Jordan and Kobe — both denied Reggie and the Pacers a title. When I was an adult, it was a similar story with Paul George, who spent years losing to LeBron. For Liquid CS and for Pacers basketball, the lot was always “almost.”

When I got into CS, I was so used to “almost” that frankly, I was comfortable with Liquid’s silverware. As a fan of a small market NBA team, I’d learned to count seconds as blessings and that applied over pretty well to NACS. 

But in 2019, TL made a few roster swaps and, somehow, in some way that the Pacers could never quite manage, they harnessed the magic of that clutch shot, made it consistent, and would cast it into almost every series, every tournament they played. No matter how a round opened or progressed, no matter the man advantage, you could never count Liquid out.

What was even more important: Liquid didn’t lose confidence in the Grand Finals like they normally would. After winning a five-game series at IEM Sydney, TL had cleared every roadbump and ran through the CS scene in the Summer of 2019, earning the fastest-ever Grand Slam and shooting up to rank 1. That brief-lived Liquid era was all gas, no brakes; everyday, some of the most miraculous, entertaining CS you’d ever see — all coming from a region that was never meant to achieve anything.

If you’re a Liquid fan, you probably remember this era even more fondly because everything that’s happened afterwards has felt like watching a car that actually has no brakes. Team Liquid declined before even reaching 2020, fared even worse in the COVID era (they had always underperformed in online matches), and came back into the LANs with what seemed like a fresh identity crisis each year. 

I write this as Liquid loses eleven consecutive rounds against Mongolz in the Austin Major and one commentator asks, “When was the last time Liquid was good?” If things look bad for Liquid, they look even worse for NA CS on the whole. In 2018, Cloud9 had won a Major for NA and in 2019 two NA teams ranked in the top 5 for the year. Now, it’s a feat for any NA team to stay in the top 10 for a month.

Liquid fans, NA CS fans, even fans of good CS might have stopped wondering where the magic went and started wondering if it will ever come back. Back in Basketball, the Pacers had been going through something similar — struggling with injuries and fairweather stars that wanted more than small markets. There was a stretch of splendid mediocrity where even those Eastern Conference Finals days, that era of Miller magic, felt like a distant dream. 

In the past two seasons, though, something clicked for the Pacers and more than rediscovering that old magic, they’ve made their own formula out of it. In every single playoff series, the Pacers came back from an insane deficit to win (often on an even more improbable shot). The Pacers have had four different comebacks in games with less than 5% win probability. 

There it is again — that feeling. This time, it feels like it’s bottled. Like I could buy it at a concession stand in the Gainsbridge Fieldhouse at halftime.

I had the good luck to go to the Fieldhouse and see one of these miracle games with my family (game one of the NBA Finals). It was an away game, so there were no players on the court and the crowd watched the game on the jumbotrons. Still, the crowd was two-thirds full and cheered like it was a home game.

We fell down by ten points and for the most part the Thunder either held or increased that lead — but heading into the half, no one seemed to be worried. This team made you believe that nothing was over until the clock hit all zeroes. In the final minutes of the fourth quarter, the Pacers began to claw their way back in. With each shot hit, the arena built further into a frenzy as though we were all there, waiting for that impossible moment that we all knew would come. 

Then, with the seconds ticking into single digits, our star player, Tyrese Hailburton, drove forward, pulled back, and unleashed a fadeaway. You could feel it, the whole game distilling itself into one shot. Pure magic. 

Seeing this magic for the second time has somehow made it all the sweeter; the whole city was painted blue and yellow in a way I’ve truly never seen before. Looking at my ten-year-old nephew, I could see that all this would become even more mystical for him, a kid witnessing a game played at its most beautiful, its most miraculous, for the first time, at an age where the edges and the details of your memories gradually fall away and you mostly come to remember the emotions, the colors, the core of the experience.

Much like with our 2019 era failing to culminate in a major, the ending was not so storybook and Haliburton, who was on pace to have the game of his life, tore his right ACL. No more magic — the Pacers gradually ran out of steam and lost Game 7 of the NBA finals. As a Pacers fan, I won’t pretend that it doesn’t hurt like hell; at the same time, I’m not pretending when I say that I’m still grateful for this year, this feeling.

To paraphrase a quote misattributed to Twain: History does not repeat, it rhymes; I couldn’t tell you when the rhyme comes for “2019,” for TL, for NA CS. I couldn’t tell you how that rhyme will sound, how long it will last, how much it will hurt when it’s over. I can’t even tell you what NA or TL needs to do to rediscover the old arcane. All I can tell you is that I have a feeling the magic will come back around and when it does — hold on tight. You’ll be chasing that feeling all over again when it goes.