When my friend invited me to a basketball playoff game, I wasn’t really sure. I had went once before, and I had spent most of the time trying to get my dad or mom to chat with me.

However, another friend named Rocky was at my house when he had called. He had jumped with excitement, and the look on his face was irresistible. My dad ushered me to go, and told me it was a chance of a lifetime to get invited to a playoff for free. I didn’t even know what a playoff was, but I sensed it was probably an important game.

During the ride to the Toyota Center (the Rocket’s home stadium), my friend Mr. Sunshine (who had invited me) told me what a playoff. “It’s a, like, really important game. Like when two teams face each other off.”

When we got to the front entrance of the Toyota Center, they asked me for a ticket. I made a face of surprise, but Mr. Sunshine hastily shoved a ticket into my hand. I looked at it. “Houston Rockets vs. Utah Jazz”, it said. They scanned it and returned it to me.

The escalator inside the Toyota Centers went up at least by three regular floors at once. It was steep, and I asked Mr. Sunshine what would happen if the escalator started going downwards and losing control. He told me we would be taking the elevator down.

Once up, I looked at my ticket. I rubbed my eyes, but it was true. We were all on row 2! I couldn’t believe we were that close to the court, but when we sat down I realized that my seat was actually the row 2 of the back section.

The game began.

I soon realized that whenever the Rockets scored a goal, they would show an interesting video. When Yao Ming scored, the big screens would swish and swash with clips of him scoring goals before, and then words would appear: Y A O… YAO!

When McGrady scored, again the screens would light up and flash with clips of him sweating, hanging off from the goal, and words would come: M C G R A D Y… MCGRADY!

On the contrary, whenever the Utah Jazz scored, the screens would change to show that 13 had changed to 14, or something along it, and then the announcer would scramble “who-or-who has won” in the middle of his never-ending talk, so that you would never be able to tell if they really had scored or not.

During half-time, they were having a really unfair little game that was really a “lets-insult-Utah-Jazz” game.

Each side had a creature that represented their team. The creature carried bags of sand from a big bin to another bin. The first one with all of the bags in the other bin wins.

We had already played this game in P.E. once. The game as we knew it was fair. This one wasn’t, though. A person dressed up like the Rocket’s bear-like mascot kept on pouncing on the Utah Jazz’s creature. We won and the other side only got two bags in.

When this little unfair game was over and the two creatures were going off of the court (to change their clothes and costumes), the mascot made a run and jumped straight onto the opponent. He almost knocked down a referee.

When it was the third quarter, they showed a song on the screen. It had no melody; you just sang it like you would with “My Poor Meatball”.

The whole song was shown in huge, black or white letters against accompanying clips of Yao Ming sweating and dangling off of the goal. It went like this:

Yao Ming,
You such a tall thing,
You come from Beijing.
Yao Ming!