Olimpia is one step away from victory, but Virtus wants redemption

“Milan the seventh at home never, ever loses it”. The wise old man of basketball who escorts us out of the Forum after the success of Olimpia in game 5 with Virtus, he has no doubts. He is someone who looks at the stats, but also at the eyes of the players. He reads to us what we still can’t see: the basketball championship has found its winner two stages from the finish line. But this year’s final series is teaching us that nothing is taken for granted when these teams of yours are on the field, the richest, but also the most complete in Italy. In game 4 Milan recovered 18 points and then risked winning in extra time. In race 5 Bologna almost put its head back out of the water after sinking to minus 13. They are two teams that never give up and never die. But it’s terribly difficult if not impossible to win when two of your best men make only one basket in all (Teodosic zero points, Shengelia 2). “They too are human, made of flesh and blood, so they can run into a bad day”, the justification of Don Sergio.

Bologna hasn’t finished its work yet, but it has only 48 hours to regain the energy that Scariolo’s rotations had preserved until the other evening. After 0-2 hours ascent Virtus has another peak to climb. A climb without a net. If he doesn’t reach the end, he salutes the Scudetto and stops to applaud the third star of Milan. It would almost be the closing of a circle: Bologna had celebrated its first star on the Olimpia field in 1984 two years after the second Milanese star. Now Milan could go and get the third star at the Segafredo Arena.

After five games and two overtimes one team cannot be said to be better than the other. We are experiencing games that come in waves. The tide pulls one way once and goodness the other. In game 5 Bologna was in front only after the first pitch. An eternal Belinelli wasn’t enough, he kept it running until the last corner, then gave up, crushed by an imperial defense of Milan. No one can win it alone even if Shavon Shields is trying hard to prove us wrong, with 22 points after 26 the other night in Bologna. But for once important plays also came from the bench, from Ricci and Biligha often forgotten down there next to the mystery Tonut and the super mystery Mannion on the other side. “It is a series that, for those who see it from the outside, is very beautiful, with high-level teams, sold out buildings and great individual plays by champions, who place the decisive plays”, said Messina who, unlike the great sage of the Forum, knows that the road to final victory is still very long.

“I think we have to ask ourselves how we managed, in these conditions, to still get into the game in the last 3-4 minutes rather than thinking about what we missed in the end – commented Scariolo promising the rematch tomorrow evening in Bologna – on an evening where we had more than one important player not in the mood, they never gave up, they came back to contact a couple of times, they showed great competitive pride, a great desire to stay glued to the game and try to win it until the end ”. There really is no one who wants to quit right now.

It’s the beauty of this final series that it’s doing good for basketball. However it ends.