[iv] (Defined here as some species of the “elimination game,” either a chance to end an opponent's season or extend your own for at least one more night—though this is unfair if used to assess LeBron, as he's finished any number of such games with critical shots late in fourth quarters; what's remembered is the few times he failed to come through, hence the derisory “King of the Third Quarter” and three-quarters-for-a-dollar forays into uncharitable humor and so forth, his being guilty of making the right basketball play in lieu of shouldering that chimerical burden, full weight of win or loss, irrespective of intrinsic elements of team sport beyond any one man's capacity to singlehandedly control; meanwhile when I began the honestly arduous process of attempting to extract some sense from the entropy I'd plunged into in these notes, he was already on the cusp of actually winning a championship, and though I suspected that the sports media's race to reconsider its unfair assessment of the King as a consummate loser was possibly premature—i.e., the Heat might very well have found a way to lose a potentially series-clinching Game 5, and this would have wound up being entirely James' fault . . . and then who knows what happens when the pressure rises markedly for a potentially career-defining Game 6? Of course this didn't happen: he played one of the greatest games in history, and the rest of his 2012 narrative is now a piece of same.) Return

[x] Literally: “Outside people.” Return

[xi] (After eight minutes.) Return