Opportunity answered

 So here is your word for today, boys and girls: Fifty.

Fifty years since Kareem and Oscar and Bobby Dandridge and Larry Costello drawin' it up over there on the bench, and an NBA championship banner goin' to the rafters in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Fifty points last night for the son of Nigerian parents who grew up in Athens, Greece, and who came to Milwaukee as an 18-year-old in 2013.

The Greek Freak, they call Giannis Antetokounmpo, but there is a flippancy to that he has long outgrown. Now you can just call him "Giannis," because as an NBA champion he has elevated himself to that same sort of  only-one-name-need-apply realm.

The 50 points he dropped on the Phoenix Suns in a decisive Game 6 will always come up now, after all, when talk turns to legendary NBA Finals performances. LeBron and Michael and a handful of others across the decades have put their teams on their backs when the deal was there for the closing, but rarely did they do what Giannis did last night.

Fifty points, 14 rebounds and five blocks in a 105-98 win. Sixteen-of-25 shooting on a night when everyone else shot 21-of-57 for the Bucks. Seventeen-of-19 at the stripe, all but 10 attempts and eight makes for Milwaukee as a team. They don't make backpacks sturdy enough to carry that sort of weight.

That he did it for a small-market Midwestern city that had gone half-a-century without the Big Trophy separates Giannis, too, of course; instead of fleeing to go super-teaming as so many others do these days, he signed a super-max contract with the Bucks before the season because he wanted to win one in Milwaukee, in his own way and on his own hook.

"Coming back, I was like 'This is my city. They trust me. They believe in me. They believe in us'," Giannis said when it was done. "There was a job that had to be finished."

This is my city ...

And when's the last time you heard that about a place like Milwaukee, except when LeBron did it for Cleveland in 2016?

The NBA is a league of transients now, flocking to the big markets on the coasts because, well, that's where the money and exposure and endorsements live. But very few NBA stars come from the background Giannis comes from; very few see America through the same sort of prism.

It may be the most stale of cliches these days to call America the land of opportunity, especially in an America that too often regards those seeking that opportunity as some sort of threat. But for Giannis it's a home truth. He came to America to test himself against the best players in the world, and now he stands astride them.

If that's not what we used to call the American Dream, what is?

And if it's no longer hip to acknowledge that Dream always has many fathers -- check out how many "self-made" oligarchs dot the landscape these days -- Giannis gladly spurns hipness for truth.

"People helped me be in this position," he said last night. "I didn't do this by myself. Every freaking day people helped me."

Milwaukee thanks them. And him.