The Third Best LeBron Block of the NBA Finals, Greeting Cards, and More: Corbin Smith's Highlights Review

This article is part of VICE Sports' 2016 NBA Playoffs coverage.

The NBA Finals are over, and have been for some time now. I could wax poetic on The Block, but you know what it is. You've seen it, and you've read about it. Kyrie Irving's shot and its metaphorical power? Whatever, dude, it's Wednesday. Kevin Love seizing Steph Curry on the line, the one great defensive play he had to give to this cold world? Amazing, awesome, and totally done to death in just two days.

All the major glories, the great highlights of the series, have come and gone, played a thousand times on your screen and in your mind, and here I am regarding history's corpse, now picked clean. I sit here just looking for something, anything, to break into component parts.

And so, denigrated by the slow passage of time, I must sift through the subprime highlights and lowlights of the Finals, looking for flecks of gold in a pile of coal dust. I don't need your pity, but that doesn't mean I don't want it.

During these playoffs, I wrote at least a little about LeBron James most weeks. The idea was to swim against the current of prevailing aesthetic and strategic thought trends that primarily ooh'd and aah'd at Steph Curry and his Golden State Warriors; the subsidiary idea was to celebrate a spectacular dude who, it seemed, was looking down the barrel of a tragic, before-his-time Finals washout at the hands of a historically outlying team. I was trying to write the history of a noble failure as it happened.

But then it didn't happen! Instead, the Cleveland Cavaliers won the title behind a one-man war from the man himself. The futuristic Warriors drowned in a sea of 90s-era switches, drives, isolations, and mismatches, and everyone wept with joy as LeBron was strapped into a harness and lifted, Peter Pan–style, into the hall of eternals.

LeBron had no fewer than three excellent blocks in the Finals. The Block, in Game 7, where he went into a nearly disassociating unreal warp-field state while chasing down Andre Iguodala and save the game. Game 6 brought us The Chew, in which LeBron sat out a Curry pump fake, beat the ball out of bounds, and turned around and embarrassed Steph forever by openly trash talking him in perfect view of the baseline camera. Both blocks would be great to write about: they are boiling over with feeling and spectacle, LeBron leaning his giant metal fist into the chest of the WHOLE IDEA of the Warriors.

But I can't do it. It's Wednesday and I've been scooped a thousand times over by every writer in the known universe. Thomas Pynchon got his Finals thoughts out before I did. I have to address the Third Best Block LeBron managed in the series:

A great block! Iman Shumpert loses Curry on a gamble, and so the Warriors point guard dashes toward the paint on a fast break looking a little wounded, either as the result of the actual wound in his knee or from the complete psychic destruction LeBron wrought the last time these two met at the rim. LeBron picks up Curry and stalks him all the way to the rim, where he rises and smacks the ball right past the outstretched finger of J.R. "Only Heart, Hustle" Smith.

In a vacuum, it's a spectacular play. LeBron sees, skips, tracks, balances himself with a dainty double wrist flick, and beats back the evil.

As a part of the broader pattern of embarrassment and shame imposed on the Warriors throughout this series, however, it is just one more brick in the wall of Curry's Finals malaise. Even live, it felt like there was nothing he could do to avoid getting flexed on, again. You turn your head from the disappointment and celebrate the Cavalier accomplishment.

Everything Curry did in the entirety of the playoffs scans faintly tragic now. He was not great in the Finals for the second year in a row, and this time his team couldn't make it happen on his behalf. LeBron blocked him into a pile of purely theoretical particles, Irving drilled the series winner over his outstretched hand, and he was victimized by the one great defensive possession Love had in him. Also his shoes were bad, his team went from high-art Greek Heroes to Loathable Nutpunching Silicon Valley Rich Kid Heels standing in the way of genuine greatness in the span of a week, his wife got mad online, and his squad lost in the Finals after an MVP season and 73 regular-season wins, leaving Michael Jordan to step on their necks forever, at least in tiresome Best Ever arguments. It was a bad scene, man.

But here he is, right before the last blow came and knocked him out of the clouds and back into the shitpit with the rest of the NBA, shooting away and transparently thinking that he is going to pull this shit off. The form is messier than normal, but the stare projects the kind of confidence he was flashing in March, and his hips do a sassy little turnout on the landing. So much of Curry's season, and his career since Steve Kerr arrived as Golden State's coach, has been marked by his dainty and unstoppable swagger, a wild confidence that totally befits someone who is dominating the NBA in a physical package, and with a set of skills, that the league has never seen before.

All 402 of Curry's regular-season three-pointers are no less significant or historic, but they do seem somehow chilled by the disappointment we now know follows them. Just one cruel irony swishing through the bottom of the net after another.

So much style, so much confidence, a basketball player somehow manifest into a floating orb of unstoppable skill—and all of it spent on what would soon become one of the most spectacular failures in NBA history. Why does anyone try anything when your efforts can be swept aside by a stiff wind?

Rituals! Rituals are great. Whether it's taking communion, clipping our nails, or teaching our dog to roll over, rituals reinforce our lives. Without them, it's a hellstorm of disordered nonsense, everyone rolling around in the dirt, trying to chew on grass for sustenance, and having sex with whoever seems like they have the most powerful egg or sperm. No jobs, no society, no restaurants.

The happenstance of Game 7 and Father's Day occurring simultaneously on Sunday had me thinking about two of my favorite rituals: post-Finals handshakes and the exchange of greeting cards. Both are manners-based and often feel very cursory. They are streaked by a tangible sadness, what with card-giving being so essentially impersonal and post-game shakes occurring after one group of people breaks the others' hearts in front of a national audience.

These intersections led me down a gentle intellectual path, and I have decided to take scraps of image from the various handshakes and head tumbles from the End of the Tour and find the hidden greeting cards for every occasion:

FOR WHEN YOU AND A CO-WORKER DO A REALLY GOOD JOB TOGETHER

FOR WHEN YOU ARE STUCK IN A ROOM WITH ENTIRELY TOO MANY PEOPLE, JUST SITTING THERE, BREATHING, THE SOUNDS OF THEIR BREATHS BUILDING AND BUILDING ON ONE ANOTHER, CRAWLING DEEPER AND DEEPER INTO YOUR EARS AND YOUR MIND AND YOU CAN FEEL THE COLLECTED MOISTURE OF YOU AND ALL THE OTHER BODIES IN THE ROOM AND YOU CAN'T GET TO THE DOOR BECAUSE THERE ARE TOO MANY GODDAMN PEOPLE IN YOUR WAY

WHEN YOU, A MIGHTY BEAR, ARE STANDING OVER THE BARELY LIVING BODY OF A WEAK, PATHETIC HUMAN WHO INVADED YOUR TERRITORY, BUT YOU ALSO RECOGNIZE THAT HE PUT UP A SURPRISINGLY GOOD FIGHT AND THE BEAR CODE OF HONOR STIPULATES THAT YOU HAVE TO SPARE HIS LIFE

WHEN YOUR NEIGHBOR, A DOCTOR WHO IS SEARCHING FOR NO LESS A BREAKTHROUGH THAN ETERNAL LIFE FOR ALL PEOPLE, EXPERIENCES A SIGNIFICANT SETBACK

WHEN YOU COME TO PICK UP A MAN WHO DIED DURING A NBA FINALS GAME 7 GAME SO YOU CAN TAKE HIM TO HELL

Want to read more stories like this from VICE Sports?_ Subscribe _to our daily newsletter.