OAKLAND, Calif. -- For 47 seasons, the city they call The Town was ahead of the curve. Before the NBA was decreed the world's coolest league, and before every A-lister gauged his or her worth on the ability to sit courtside, Oakland knew. They showed up to watch the Golden State Warriors and whoever else was on the floor -- sometimes they showed up because of whoever else was on the floor -- and during every game you could look out over the crowd and see the rarest scene in modern American professional sports: a fan base that reflected the community.

There's not much to recommend the building, really. It's functional, because that used to be where the discussion started and ended. It has narrow corridors and shoe-horned concessions and not nearly enough restrooms. The low ceiling is a concrete lid that traps the noise inside and sends it ricocheting throughout the arena and down into the marrow of anyone sitting inside.

It was fitting, then, that the last night of Oracle Arena was all about the one thing it has always been about: the game. Game 6 of the NBA Finals was made for the basketball purist -- a riveting, multilayered, 600-page Russian novel of a game compressed into a taut 2½ hours. The Warriors lost 114-110 and the Toronto Raptors went home with Canada's first NBA title, but in a strange way it felt like Oakland's final middle finger to San Francisco and gentrification and the idea that the game alone is no longer enough.

Here, Oakland said at the end of its final act, see if you can do better.

With 37.7 seconds left and the Raptors up by a point, 109-108, with Klay Thompson headed for an MRI machine and the Warriors whittled down to the beaks and the claws, they interrupted the near-constant pandemonium by playing a bit from "Rocky" on the big screen. They went big -- the music, the one-handed pushups, the charge up the steps -- and it elicited almost no reaction. This privileged crowd was watching the nonfiction version play out in front of them, at a time when the stakes couldn't be higher, and the fans didn't need a cheap tug on the emotions.