Cleveland’s 52-year wait for an NBA title is over

Kyrie Irving, with 53 seconds left on the clock, broke the tie between the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Golden State Warriors and sealed victory in the last game of the NBA finals.

He jumped from the 3-point line, pushing the ball out in a long, slow fall into the net. Golden State’s Stephen Curry couldn’t quite reach far enough to block the throw.

The Cavaliers won last night’s NBA Championship 93-89, closing a hard-fought series between two record-breaking teams. LeBron James, the 2016 MVP, made good on a 2-year-old promise to bring the championship to his home town.

“I’m home,” he said in the postgame interview, “Cleveland! This is for you!”

Game 7, the end of a series in which the Warriors seemed dominant, barely tipped after a wild back-and-forth in the Cavs favor, as they relied on James and Irving’s pin-point shooting and aggressive defense.

The Warriors’ Draymond Green impressed, making up for his absence in Game 5. He threw six 3-pointers, scoring 32 points and nearly hitting a triple-double of points, rebounds, and assists. But his team hardly seemed to be backing him up at times, with Curry and Klay Thompson, the game-dominating Splash Brothers, struggling to find their range when it mattered most.

The Warriors led 49-42 at halftime, thanks to 20 threes and Green’s 22 points. But the Cavs stole back the lead and then tied the game at the end of the third quarter.

James never slowed down, almost scoring a triple double in the second quarter. With five minutes left in the fourth, the Warriors clung to a fragile 1-point lead. James stepped away from his defender and threw in a triple to open the game up again.

In these last minutes, when everything could have changed with one of Curry’s long-range 3-pointers, he and Thompson missed over and over again.

The Warriors scored another 3 points to tie the game at 89-89 but it was not enough after Irving’s game-winning 3-pointer with less than a minute on the clock.

As the whistle blew, James sank to the floor, face down.

He had done it.

“We made history tonight,” Cavs coach Tyronn Lue said. “Cleveland, Ohio, we’re coming back, baby!”

At the start of the series, it hadn’t looked like they could pull it off. The Warriors, sometimes called the best team ever, came off a record-breaking 73-win regular season to push a 3-1 lead in this final series, dominating the early games.

But the Cavs fought back when it mattered, winning Game 5 112-97 in the Warrior’s Oracle Arena, with James and Irving combining for a total of 82 points in the second half alone. They were the first teammates to each score 40-plus points in an NBA Finals game.

They did it again in Thursday’s Game 6, when they won by 115-101. Officials ejected Curry from the stadium in the last few minutes of the game due to his meltdown over several questionable calls. With him gone, the Cavaliers opened their lead, tying the series at 3-3 and forcing the decisive Game 7 in Oakland, where they finally won.

It was the first time in the NBA Finals a team pulled back to win from a 3-1 deficit.