Being a Phoenix Suns fan.

Beyond Mr. ORNG, watching the Phoenix Suns has always been spectacular. If you doubt me, use a search engine, or two, and look up 'NBA triple over time games' and see how many we are involved in. Or even Nash vs Kidd. Ditch the nostalgia aspect, and just look at the 7SOL Suns. It was somewhere between ballet, street ball, and a video game.

Now just start remembering all the inbetweens.

Charles Barkely anyone? How about that Connie Hawkins guy who helped change the way the game was played?

Hell! Two of the most memorable dunks of all time come from this city:

K.J. on Hakeem Olajuwon & the inconic image of Tom Chambers on who cares what that guys name was!

Start throwing in Cotton and Al McCoy, and keep on throwing in. History has been favorable for us.

Standing in front of us is a terrible season.

Deal With It!

If you are anything like myself, you will find your rear firmly planted in front of any screen that will put the Phoenix Suns within your line of sight. Every game will be witnessed, painfully processed, and expelled in a vomituous puddle of words.

But what will we do? Will we, as fans, really allow ourselves to continue dreaming through trade machines and excuses, or just cut this franchise some slack?

From winning to losing to winning, there is a transitional period which cannot be avoided. This is where we find ourselves. Ditch the if's, and's, & but's. This season is a wash.

It's a wash for every reason you can think of, and every reason you can't. We have been asking ourselves the same question for a few years now, "What do we do now?" The phrasing has been different, the conclusions radically different, and when the diagnosis was arrived at, it suffered the same deficiency, wishful thinking.

My diagnosis?

We let the body die. Don't cut anything away. Don't waste time with medicine. Just let the Leper fall apart. Steve and Grant have enough time to find that Championship team. The remains can be built upon, the petri dish of this organization, will stay on the court, and grow, and be added to. The primordial soup of excellence is lying there, within these men. The 'Divine Spark' that will create what we are looking for is beyond our bitching and complaining and fingerpointing.

We have so much to be proud of. Look at the men that choose to be here, in any year, as human beings or basketball players. Look at how much love we have for LB, The Dragon, KJ, TC, Charles 'That's trrrrble' Barkley, Elliot 'Socks' Perry, MVSteve and BAMF and so on.

I promise you, each and every one of you, it is o.k. to let go of this season and see every inch of it that is worth looking at. Robin Lopez is back in form. Marcin Gortat is doing better than we should expect. Markeef Morris is an amazing draft pick (Thank f'ing God we finally kept a draft pick!). Hakim seems to have picked up a needed lesson or two. We have signed on several people who are desperate to prove something to themselves. Channing will come around, as will Jared. The youth movement has silently crept upon us. And that has given us a lot to be optimistic about. But let us look at things as they really are:

If we allow this old identity to die, something we can be proud of will grow out of it.

If we allow ourselves to stay trapped in an identity we do not embody we will continue to be a failure.

And that's the way it is.