FOR TWO GLORIOUS hours on Thursday night, all is right in the basketball universe. From where Monty McCutchen is sitting in the raucous lower bowl of Oracle Arena, about 20 rows up from the floor during Game 1 of the NBA Finals, a multitude of spotlights bathe the court with a warm glow.

The NBA's new vice president and head of referee development and training, McCutchen observes the Game 1 crew move with precision from end to end. McCutchen, after a 25-year career as one the league's most highly regarded game officials, is pleased with what he's witnessing tonight. It isn't merely that the calls are decisive and clean -- with the world's top players even, at times, raising their hands in acknowledgment that they'd committed a foul -- it's how they're being made.

"It's not about the minutiae of the 100 percent accuracy," McCutchen says in the second quarter. "I'm looking at our positioning. Our mind is given away by our body. If we are in dependable positions, then we're adhering to our principles and this will lead to good work. Tonight, their bodies are showing that they're in control of their minds. And if we're in the right places, then I trust our judgment."

The crowd groans at a no-call when Steph Curry gratuitously tries to leap into Jordan Clarkson while hoisting a twisting, left-handed attempt from about 19 feet. But Clarkson deftly lands without moving forward before Curry throws the ball at the basket, maintaining legal guarding position. Curry protests by half-heartedly flinging his hand at nobody in particular, but even he doesn't seem entirely convinced he was cheated out of a couple of foul shots.

While he watches the action, McCutchen is on his personal device, logged into a Slack channel on which he discusses impressions of the referees' performance with a group that includes the league's new senior vice president and head of referee operations, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Michelle Johnson, and the league's five developmental advisers, all retired officials.

One row up and 10 seats over, Byron Spruell, the NBA's president of league operations -- and McCutchen's boss -- is similarly pleased as an exciting game with a razor-thin margin heads toward the midway point of the fourth quarter. Spruell, hired two summers ago, has presided over an initiative by the NBA to improve officiating.

"This is the quality product of intense competition being played out by great players on the court and adjudicated by excellent referees," Spruell would say the following morning. "That's what you're sitting there watching. In my mind, I'm thinking, 'We're getting another clean game.' And then what happened happened."

What happens is a chance event, one of the vagaries of the confrontational, fast-moving professional game played by otherworldly athletes and watched by tens of millions across the globe: Kevin Durant and LeBron James meet in the paint -- a collision between an unstoppable force and an immovable object.

"While it appears on tape, 'How could anyone not see that?' that's not how life works. We all have doubt in our work, even after it's done." Monty McCutchen, NBA vice president and head of referee development and training

With the Warriors trailing by two and only 40 seconds remaining in regulation, Durant beats Jeff Green off the dribble and makes his approach into the paint, where James meets him. Two whistles pierce the deafening roar of the crowd. One belongs to Tony Brothers, the trailing referee, who calls a blocking foul on James. But crew chief Kenny Mauer, situated just behind the baseline, motions a charge, and that's the initial call on the play.

Neither of the two officials, nor the third, Ed Malloy, is entirely certain whether James is fully outside the restricted area, which triggers a replay review. And after huddling around the replay monitor, the officials reverse the call -- a despondent James is assessed a blocking foul. What moments earlier appeared to be a 2-point lead and possession for Cleveland in the season's most important minute out of more than nearly 80,000 played since opening night becomes a tie game.

In an instant, the crisp, clean game spirals into turmoil. And seemingly every NBA fan online, on a couch, in a sports bar and glued to a device transforms into an amateur replay official, interpreting the granular legalese of the NBA rulebook, a digital campus of Talmudic basketball scholars.

Tyronn Lue and LeBron James ask Tony Brothers for an explanation in the fourth quarter of Game 1 of the Finals. Lachlan Cunningham/Getty Images

THE 2017-18 NBA season has been one of transition for the league's officiating ranks. Once owners and the players' association cleared the hurdle of constructing a new collective bargaining agreement in December 2016, the NBA moved toward its next major undertaking: a 16-point plan to modernize the league's referee operation.

Over the course of 2017, the league would draw on everything from the use of analytics to the wide-ranging expertise of Johnson to remake its education and training processes. McCutchen, one of the league's most respected game officials, was hired to oversee referee development and training.

The timing and magnitude of the effort dovetailed with a period of souring relations between players and referees. Less than three weeks before McCutchen was brought on, LeBron James was ejected from a game for the first time in his career. Less than a week later, mild-mannered Warriors guard Shaun Livingston literally butted heads with 18-year veteran referee Courtney Kirkland after Livingston contested a no-call. McCutchen barely had a chance to order business cards in mid-January when Carmelo Anthony declared he was "done with the refs."

"The season started out chippy," says Spruell. "No question about it. Player-to-player interactions, player-to-referee interactions, coach-to-referee interactions. As we got to midseason, flagrants were ticking up a little bit."

Just before the start of the postseason, ESPN's Brian Windhorst enumerated the confluence of factors contributing to the icy conditions, from the retirement of some venerable officials to the disproportionate number of high-profile players involved in incidents that are now amplified 24 hours a day on every conceivable media platform.

"If there's an empathy toward all of our humanness, I think the league will be in a better place." Monty McCutchen

"When you have a public narrative, whether it's completely true or not, it's inconsequential to the fact that there's a kernel of truth to it," McCutchen says.

Officiating has long been a thorn in the side of the league, with even the most avid fans historically suspicious of NBA officiating. The very nature of basketball at the professional level presents a bevy of challenges. Now more than ever, the game travels at warp speed. Calls like traveling and the block/charge are inordinately difficult for human beings to make in real time, no matter how advanced and experienced the game official.

By and large, according to the league, NBA officials get the vast majority of calls correct. An independent website examining data from the controversial "Last Two Minutes Reports" determined that more than 92 percent of calls during that period are correct. Moreover, the league's data shows that referees in this year's playoffs, including Game 1 of the Finals, have an accuracy rate of 92.6 percent in the last two minutes and overtime when taking into account whistles and non-calls.

"NBA officiating," McCutchen says frequently, "is about excellence, not perfection."

In 2016, Monty McCutchen missed a travel violation by Russell Westbrook late in Game 1 of the West finals. Christian Petersen/Getty Images

SPRINTING DOWN THE sideline in Russell Westbrook's wake is one of the many challenges of a job fraught with many, but that was the task for McCutchen on this day -- with Westbrook racing down the floor, the Thunder leading the Warriors by three and 20 seconds remaining in Game 1 of the 2016 Western Conference finals.

McCutchen was acutely aware of the situation: Trailing, Golden State needed to foul to reclaim possession. Mindful of that, he focused his attention on the players' upper bodies, because that's often where the contact between defender and offensive player would occur.

Pressured by Klay Thompson, Westbrook tried to put on the breaks as he crossed midcourt. In doing so, Westbrook's right foot glided across the surface for a good 18 inches before he motioned for a timeout, which McCutchen granted. The Thunder would go on to win the game 108-102.

Moments later, McCutchen would return to the officials' locker room in the bowels of Oracle Arena -- the same sparse space appointed with an old leatherette couch, a monitor, a stationary bike and a sad deli platter where he would review the block/charge with Mauer and his crew a little less than two years later. But unlike the complicated sequence on Thursday night, McCutchen's error was cut and dry: He missed the call. And now, he'd have to write about it.

"First of all, you have to face the computer and type it in," McCutchen remembers. "You've got to own that. You can't run from it. Fifty million people just saw this. It's not like you're going to get away with it."