Stockton's shot

Utah had reached the conference finals in 1992 and in 1996. Both times it stopped there.

The lost conference final is a particular place. High enough to be taken seriously, never high enough to be remembered.

In 1997 the team arrives with its best regular season: sixty-four wins, a point differential above eight a game, and Karl Malone voted MVP ahead of Michael Jordan.

Across from them, Houston fields Hakeem Olajuwon, Clyde Drexler and Charles Barkley. Three future Hall of Famers assembled for one last attempt, who know it is the last.

Utah leads three games to two. Game 6 is in Houston, where a defeat would send everyone to a Game 7 at home, and also back into ten years of unpleasant memories.

The game does not look like anything Utah enjoys.

Drexler makes five threes, Houston scores 28 in the second quarter and leads at half-time. It is an open, running game, the exact opposite of what Jerry Sloan built.

Utah answers the only way it knows: by doing the same thing again.

Twenty-seven points in the third quarter, thirty-three in the fourth, Malone on the block, Stockton kicking the ball back out. No adaptation, no surprise, simple execution repeated until it was enough.

With 2.8 seconds left the game is tied. The ball comes back to Stockton behind the arc.

Charles Barkley closes out and arrives half a second late. The shot goes up, drops, and Stockton is carried off a floor that is not his own.

Utah would lose the Finals to Chicago, then do it again the following year and lose again.

This shot remains the franchise's summit all the same, and not only because it is spectacular. It is the logical conclusion of eighteen years of repetition: two players who have run the same action so long they no longer need to look at each other, in a situation where everybody knows what is coming.

For Houston it was the end. The Olajuwon-Drexler-Barkley trio would never get past this point, and all three were past thirty.

There is a symmetry basketball rarely produces this cleanly: two teams built around ageing players, one place available, and a three-point shot to settle it.

The next day, Salt Lake City found out what an NBA Finals feels like. Twenty-eight years later, it has not been back.