Champs to chumps to champs

 They confounded us to the last, those scamps. Seriously, was there anyone out there who didn't think the Golden State Warriors were sure to lose Game 6 in Boston last night, simply because these ebb-and-flow NBA Finals seemed destined to go the full seven?

But the Celtics, looking exhausted, couldn't hang, and Steph Curry became Steph Curry again after that weird interlude as Stiff Curry, and the Warriors rolled, 103-90. Not a lot of drama to attend the clinching moment of an odyssey that was all drama.

The Warriors have now won four titles in the last seven years, which sounds as dynastic as it gets these days until you realize how they did it. In between titles three and four, see, they went from the presidential suite to the sub-basement and back again. They broke up a Superfriends champ and put together another, entirely different sort of champ four years later.

This was no Steph/Klay/Draymond/KD juggernaut, after all. It was Steph and a lot of changeable parts -- some nights Draymond, some nights Andrew Wiggins, some nights a combination of Steph and Wiggins and Jordan Poole and assorted others pieces, like Gary Payton II, Otto Porter Jr. and Kevon Looney. 

"A collective season," Klay Thompson characterized it last night.

And very different from the Warriors' last title run in 2017. 

This time Curry broke his hand and Thompson was still struggling to regain his form after not one but two devastating Achilles tears, and Golden State didn't have a healthy roster until the playoffs. And there were no Superfriends around to help.

That ended when Kevin Durant left for the Nets after the 2018 Finals loss to the Raptors, which ended in Game 6 with Thompson suffering the Achilles injury that would keep him sidelined for a year. Two years later, in 2019-20, Golden State was the worst team in the NBA, going 15-50 in the Covid bubble year.

Two years after that, they're back on top again.

And in the deciding game, the Collective was its collective self. Draymond Green finally awoke from his series-long slumber with a classic Draymond line: 12 points, 12 rebounds, eight assists, two steals, two blocks. Wiggins contributed 18 points, six boards, five assists, four steals and three blocks. Poole scored 15 off the bench. And Curry?

Three nights after an unaccountably horrid Game 5 -- 16 points on 7-of-22 shooting, including zippo-for-9 from the 3-point arc -- he was back to being Steph again, going for 34, seven and seven on12-of-21 shooting and 6-of-11 from Threeville. It mirrored his legendary Game 4 in Boston, when he went for 43 points, seven threes and 10 rebounds to keep Golden State from going down 3-games-to-1 in the series.

Instead, the Warriors never lost again, winning Games 4, 5 and 6, all by double digits, to clinch the title. Champs to chumps to champs in five seasons.

You can't quite call that a dynasty. But you can surely call it something.