The epic LeBron James-Steph Curry rivalry delivered once again. Enjoy them while you can

T here are certain constants in our lives: north stars by which we can measure and trace the changes that occur around them as time passes us by. For the better part of the last decade, the steady fulcrum around which the NBA has revolved has been the special ongoing rivalry between future first-ballot Hall of Famers LeBron James and Stephen Curry.

Some basketball fans grew up at a time when they watched Magic Johnson and Larry Bird duke it out year after year, and other fandoms were formed during the swath of time in which extraordinary players, like Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant, dominated the league and had no singular, definitive rival to speak of. Personally, basketball didn’t come into my life in a meaningful way until early adulthood, so for basically as long as I’ve been paying attention, an NBA centered around LeBron and Steph has represented the permanent blueprint. Any aspirant to the throne inevitably had to go through one or the other to reach the mountaintop, and for the four straight years Steph’s Warriors and LeBron’s Cavaliers met in the NBA finals (from 2015 to 2018), no one successfully did.

Because of this, it’s been hard to imagine a world in which the James v Curry battle wasn’t at least bubbling underneath the surface, if not outright dominating the headlines. So when the stars finally aligned for the two supernovas of the hardwood to meet in the postseason once again, for the first time in five years, it felt, in a way, as if all was right with the world.

But as their Western Conference semi-final series unfolded over the past week and half, something became clear that elicited both a palpable nostalgia and a bit of discomfort: this was the beginning of the end of this era. The post-LeBron