The Sonics (and the NBA) are Coming Back to Seattle!

“You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” — Trad.

Our fight seems so silly now. You wanted a new home, we wondered what was wrong with the old one. Soon we stopped trusting each other, even stooped to name-calling. You started thinking you’d be better off with someone else. And — we’ll admit it — sometimes we thought that too. But then you left.

And we went crazy.

We made movies for you, we bitched out our friends for talking to you, we tried to pretend you didn’t exist. We even stalked you 3,000 miles away. We had to have you back. Of course we’ll build you a new place. Need a loan?

Now you’re coming back. And we are SO HAPPY.

—

Chris Hansen and Steve Ballmer have negotiated a deal to buy the Sacramento Kings. They’ll ask and almost assuredly get permission to move the team to Seattle for the 2013-14 season. After five seasons without, Seattle will have an NBA team again.

The NBA was not a runaway success when it first came to Seattle in 1967. There had been no huge public demand, no heroic local owner — at first, the NBA didn’t even disclose who the owners were. Only 4,500 people came to the Supersonics’ first home game; the team was frequently outdrawn at Seattle Center Coliseum by a minor league hockey team.

As the Sonics improved and hockey left, Seattle embraced pro hoops. In 1979 the Sonics moved to the larger Kingdome and won an NBA championship. The team led the NBA in attendance in each of the next four seasons. From 1975 to 1998, Seattle was one of the NBA’s most consistently successful teams, missing the playoffs just five times.

Then things went downhill. A storm of shrinking state budgets, terrible coaching, terrible drafting, a petty and tone-deaf owner, and clueless local leadership pushed the team into the hands of out-of-town owners, who moved the franchise to Oklahoma City over desperate local protests.

While most fans of the former Sonics were in one of the various stages of grief, one man was looking to the future. And, thank God, that man is really, really rich. Seattle-raised hedge fund manager Chris Hansen started quietly buying land south of Safeco Field for a potential new arena.

Once his purchases became public, he negotiated first with the city and county to get political support for a new arena, and then with the mercurial owners of the Sacramento Kings to purchase that franchise. The NBA must still approve the sale and the move, but barring Hansen’s $951-million hedge fund going under, approval is a formality. The result: Largely due to Hansen’s patient, low-key efforts, Seattle will have basketball again in October and a state-of-the-art arena soon after.

In the next few weeks, you may notice strange behaviors from local sports fans — penciling out season ticket budgets on envelopes, suddenly taking an interest in a confused 22-year-old named DeMarcus Cousins, standing wordlessly and worshipfully outside KeyArena. Our minds are in the future now too, instead of the past. In about nine months, we’ll be proud hoops parents.

You can buy that Sonics bobblehead for $75 from Gasoline Alley Antiques.