You’d be forgiven for forgetting that an NBA team played in Sacramento between 2006 and 2012. Until recently, the Kings have almost always been an NBA backwater, only relevant to the non-Central Valley fan in specific instances.

The Kings spent the first half-decade of this century playing vibrant, synaptic basketball in front of boisterous crowds, but injuries and a mangled reloading project sent them scuttling toward basketball obscurity as quickly as they’d risen to join the NBA’s elite. In 2008-09, two years after their eighth straight playoff berth, they won 17 games. They were an irrelevant blank slate of a team, toiling to the lottery in a decrepit arena, playing John Salmons heavy minutes and napping so far on the fringes of the NBA zeitgeist you couldn’t see them unless you squinted. Believing in the Kings was like rooting for a ghost.

There were brief glimmers of hope, as there are for any team. Kevin Martin rode his jittery offensive game to near-stardom, and Tyreke Evans won the 2009-10 Rookie of the Year, but their talents spoiled before the team could do anything with them. Those Kings were aimless, unmoored from any kind of long-term plan. They kept slipping and falling on banana peels that they themselves were throwing. Ownership was, at best, apathetic toward the on-court plight of the team, and more likely actively scheming on how they could pull up stakes and move the Kings to Anaheim, Seattle, Las Vegas, Virginia Beach or anywhere else. The fans that made ARCO Arena unplayable for opponents were sent out on an ice floe while the Maloofs gazed elsewhere.

The recession exacerbated the problems surrounding the team from every side. The Maloof brothers saw their Las Vegas-based properties radically devalued, and the Central Valley suffered as much as anywhere in the country. Suddenly, relocation was no longer a looming specter off on the margins of the Sacramento inferiority complex, it was an existential threat. Los Angeles was winning titles while the economically wrecked capital was looking at life without an NBA team.

See, the Sacramento civic identity is bound up in its contradictory proximities. Between San Francisco and Stockton, there is a daunting spectrum of cities Sacramento could be. Sacramento is the capital of California, sure, but it feels nascent and lumpy. The old line goes “Sacramento is a great place … to be from.” The Kings are an aspirational signifier, a mark that the city takes itself seriously and intends to become more than a Central Valley outpost or the Bay Area’s weird little cousin. When Phil Jackson called it a cow town in 2002, he put words to the regionally held anxiety that Sacramento, a diffuse, unglamorous city, was altogether unworthy of its team.

I couldn’t leave a game for years without thinking, “Was that my last one ever?” Thankfully, I don’t know when that will be. Jackson was wrong. The Maloofs came right to the cusp of a move to Anaheim and then a sale to a Seattle-based group -- the saga was so painfully drawn out that it has its own 1,500-word Wikipedia entry -- but NBA and city officials pulled them back both times. The drama and the worrying all ended when Vivek Ranadive officially bought the keys to the franchise from the Maloofs on May 16, 2013. Two antagonistic years of fake arena deals, under-the-table agreements and shady political maneuvers dressed up as grassroots activism culminated in an outcome Kings fans ached for. It was exhausting.

The team that Ranadive inherited was a tragicomic bunch, stuck running antiquated sets and squabbling with one another over who could take the most meaningless shots. Everyone was auditioning for a role elsewhere after the inevitable roster shake-up that comes with a new ownership group. There was a special awfulness about those pre-Vivek teams. The cartoonish vodka pitchmen at the top were so obviously apathetic about the team as anything other than a business object that games felt farcical. Fans showed up and cheered, because Kings fans have supported horrible teams for 25 years, but you never got the sense that the franchise could responsibly develop DeMarcus Cousins or any other young talents.

Owner Vivek Ranadive has brought ambition back to the franchise. Rocky Widner/NBAE/Getty Images

This led to such a dearth of on-court expectations that existing became all that mattered. As long as the Kings stayed in Sacramento, it was enough. It was almost comforting, watching and cheering for a team where winning and losing were ancillary. I could appreciate Cousins’ balletic moshing and Isaiah Thomas’ electron impersonation as basketball art pieces, divorced from consequence. But as liberating as freedom was, I got jealous. I watched fans of other waylaid teams rejoice when their clubs made the leap it never seemed like the Kings could.

It’s only Year 2 of the Ranadive era, but that hangdog legacy is dead. This is the team of the expanding, forward-thinking Sacramento. The noxious self-defeatism of the Maloofs is all gone, and the new Kings are finally caught up with the rest of the league. Ranadive and his team are enthusiastically trying to push every boundary they can, for better or for worse. Some of their forays past the bleeding edge of basketball orthodoxy -- like biometric data gathering and the idea of playing with an ultimate frisbee-style cherry picker -- have drawn criticism and mockery. But look at their good ideas -- like signing up for the Catapult tracking system and hiring advanced stats wizard Dean Oliver -- next to the questionable ones, and you’ll see that the Kings aren’t blindly swinging out for megalomania or the sake of selling themselves as “NBA 3.0.” These new Kings are ambitious and aggressive about winning as many games as they can with whoever they employ or shuffling their roster around until it works.

For fans, this ambition is altogether unrecognizable. They have followed their team to the edge of what looked like a flat world and seen the abyss. Success, whatever shape that takes on if it comes, is at least in the parlance of the Kings now, and that’s obtusely scary. There’s a specific sense of paranoid joy that comes with going all-in. Losses hurt now, which is its own kind of novelty. When Vivek took over, the team crossed a rubicon. They’re probably in a transition phase, but don’t dare say that to the flesh-and-blood Kings.

The team started 5-1, their best in a decade and a half. After a wonky first season of trades and an on-the-fly identity reconfiguring, Michael Malone has his system in place, and management is edging closer to a roster that is of their making. The Kings aren’t playing pretty basketball, but it doesn’t matter. It wouldn’t quite make sense if they were.

Instead, their style has a visceral crunch to it. Some of this is the Kings’ first competent defensive scheme in 10 years. Some of it is Cousins’ immutable bigness. For all their early successes, the Kings aren’t a finished project, and they exude this roughness on the court. But it’s more satisfying this way. Reggie Evans cosplaying a tornado, Ben McLemore finally learning to channel his athleticism, the team’s craggy idiosyncrasies speak of ACTION and POWER and other big, loud words that the Kings have never embodied before. For a franchise just getting over deep uncertainty, winning ugly is the loudest and most gratifying way to assert importance.

The Kings, now 6-5, may or may not matter this April, when the playoffs start. But for the first time in years, it’s the biggest priority. For years, it was putting roots down in Sacramento and defying the city’s geographically circumscribed narrative. Somehow, that worked, and it’s time to move on up. There is no ride off into the sunset now. This season isn’t the epilogue. This is the start of the Kings’ time as a legitimate, functioning NBA team.

Patrick Redford is a contributor to VICE Sports, Deadspin, and The Classical. Bug him on Twitter @patrickredford.