It’s a pretty common strategy: If the defense is loading up on you, overplaying you, trying to turn up the heat and crank up the pressure, give it up. Move the ball, then move without the ball. Trust your teammates. Trust that you’ll get it back.

Trust that by making the right play, the smart play — even if you don’t ultimately end up making the play — good things will happen. Maybe even great things.

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And so, here we are. The Golden State Warriors are NBA champions again. Kevin Durant’s the Most Valuable Player of the 2017 NBA Finals. LeBron James is still the best player in the world. And then, when you get a second to spare a thought for someone else, you arrive at Stephen Curry — the two-time MVP who winds up with supporting-actor billing in the Warriors’ return to the top after last year’s historic collapse. He’s not sweating his spot on the call sheet.

He’s smoking a cigar that someone rolled a century ago and that he put on ice a year ago. He’s enjoying listening to Durant call him “Two-Time” — as in “two-time champion.” He’s got a smile you’d need a surgeon to remove.

He’s an all-timer now, beyond doubt. One of just nine players ever to win multiple league MVP awards and multiple NBA titles.

“It’s kinda hard to argue what I’ve done and what’s going on here,” Curry said, according to Marcus Thompson II of the Bay Area News Group. “I will say that.”

As inarguable as it gets, a first-ballot Hall of Famer in only eight NBA seasons, just three months removed from his 29th birthday. And perfectly positioned to rack up even more accolades — and a $200-plus-million contract — over the next few years.

Give it up, and get it back. Get all of it back. Get everything.

After Game 5, Bob Myers was asked how many players — after winning consecutive league MVP awards, after becoming the first unanimous MVP in league history, and after limping to the finish line in a failed pursuit of a repeat — would willingly cede shots, touches, attention and at least part of the spotlight to a player as total as Durant, because that’s what would be best for the team. The Warriors’ general manager could only think of one.

“The only one I know so far is Steph Curry,” Myers said. “If you want to win, it doesn’t matter. It’s not about who scored what. It’s about winning. I think he knew that. He won a championship, and then we were close and didn’t win one. So you have a clear sense of what matters when you go through that stuff.”

Basking in the afterglow of Monday’s victory at Oracle Arena, Curry fielded questions about “that stuff” he went through last year — the Round 1 ankle tweak and knee sprain, the consistent inconsistence he displayed through the rest of the postseason, the inability to torch mismatches and drain shots when it mattered most — and how those difficulties inform his experience of title No. 2.

“It’s different just because of what happened last year to be honest,” Curry told reporters. “We went through, for lack of a better term, basketball hell, in that sense of just being so close to getting the job done and not realizing that goal, and having to think about that for an entire year and compartmentalize and just try to keep the right perspective about this season and learn the lessons that we learned.”

The lessons Curry learned? Come June and a date with LeBron, there’s no substitute for health — with the possible exception of Kevin Freaking Durant.

So he took part in the Hamptons meeting with Durant, sitting alongside Draymond Green, Klay Thompson and Andre Iguodala, and letting KD know that he didn’t care if the Warriors were his team so long as they were a better team. He stayed home from the 2016 Summer Olympics, watching Durant, Green and Thompson win gold in Rio while rehabbing his ailing wheels to get himself ready to hit the ground running in October.

He shouldered the burden of authoring an encore to one of the greatest seasons the sport has ever seen, this time with the added weight of increased expectations and the individual impediment of knowing he wouldn’t get quite as many opportunities as the Warriors worked to integrate Durant. More than that: he made a concerted effort to create the space for that integration, playing off the ball more frequently to make sure the marquee new addition got a steady diet of looks in comfortable spots, even if it meant an associated drop in counting stats that led many observers to say Steph was having a “down year.”