If you're a Bay Area sports fan of a certain age, Game 1 of the NBA Finals should look strikingly familiar to you.

Yes, your Golden State Warriors will host the series opener at Oracle Arena, marking the third straight year that the Western Conference portion of the Finals will be played a stone's throw from I-880 in Oakland. But darker memories lie just a pebble's toss away from the arena, in the other direction.

That's where the Oakland A's play now, and that's where the A's played nearly three decades ago, when one of the most skilled teams in baseball history fell short of expectations. If the Warriors fail to win it all this year, they'll own the same fate as those A's teams: the best collection of talent in its sport, winning just one title in three years when a dynasty looked possible.

By both Vegas odds and computer simulations, the Warriors enter this year's Finals as huge favorites to win. It's easy to see why. Golden State won 67 games this year, six wins more than the next-best team (San Antonio) and 16 more than their Finals opponents from Cleveland. They led the NBA in points scored (115.9 per game) and point differential (+11.6), dwarfing the Cavs (110.3, +3.2) in both. By pace-adjusted metrics, the Warriors' defense was nearly as dominant as their offense, finishing second in the league to the Spurs; the Cavs, by contrast, finished 22nd.

Led by the killer trio of Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green, the 2015-2016 Warriors won more games than any other team in NBA history, going 73-9. When the season ended, Golden State responded by...signing Kevin Durant, a generational player who's been a cyborg of offensive efficiency while also keying the team's defense with guard-every-position versatility and long-armed rim protection. Even a casual fan can't help but notice how impossibly great the Warriors' big four truly is.

Of course, fans both casual and hard-core couldn't help but notice how great the 1988-1990 A's were either. In 1988, the A's led MLB with a sparkling 104-58 record, while also leading the majors in run differential. In 1989, the 99-win A's again owned the best record in baseball, and again topped everyone else in run differential. Incredibly, they pulled off that double feat again in 1990, with their 103 wins besting the next-best team by a huge eight wins.

Like the Warriors, the A's could beat you in a million different ways. Jose Canseco was the freak of nature who as a 23-year-old in 1988 became the first player ever to hit 40 homers and steal 40 bases in the same season. Mark McGwire was Canseco's 24-year-old wingman at the start of Oakland's three-year run, a towering slugger who crushed 104 homers from 1988-1990 and would go to far greater feats of strength later in his career. Collectively, they were known as the Bash Brothers, the forebearers to Curry and Thompson's 30-footer-launching Splash Brothers.

The Bash Brothers, ladies and gentlemen. Getty Images

But the A's offered much more than just brute power. Dave Stewart was a rubber-armed machine, firing 33 complete games(!) over the A's three-year run, topped by an incredible 275 ⅔ innings pitched(!!!) in 1988. Bob Welch was his veteran wingman, winning an unfathomable 27 games in 1990, back when people used to value wins as a worthwhile pitching stat. The bullpen was an impenetrable force, with Dennis Eckersley's fastball-slider humiliating even the game's best hitters, and manager Tony La Russa aggressively using and codifying the set roles and platoon advantages that would come to define modern bullpens. Carney Lansford could fall out of bed and hit .300. When the A's reacquired future Hall of Famer and Swagger God Rickey Henderson before the '89 season, they gained the on-base skills and speed to make them even more formidable. This was the young, explosive, terrifying team that should have raised multiple championship banners.

But sports can be cruel and unpredictable, few sports more than baseball. A hot pitcher here, a bloop single there, and a royally overmatched underdog can come out on top. That's what happened in '88, when the Dodgers employed an elite pitcher having a historic season in Orel Hershiser, some stingy pitching sidekicks...and an offense completely devoid of elite talent that was actually healthy. Then 33-year-old slap-hitting utilityman Mickey Hatcher suddenly turned into Babe Ruth, one-legged star Kirk Gibson went full Willis Reed, and the rest was history.

The A's did win it all in '89, beating the Giants in the infamous Bay Bridge World Series that included one of the most jarring earthquakes in California's history. But in 1990, Oakland came up short again, getting swept by a Reds team that featured a nasty bullpen, a handful of stars, but still nowhere near the firepower that Oakland possessed. The A's missed the playoffs the next year, and made the postseason just once between 1991 and 1999. Just like that, a team that should have become one of the greatest dynasties in baseball history ended up as one of the sport's biggest cautionary tales.

These are the memories Bay Area sports fans don't want to revisit over the next two weeks with the Warriors. The 2015-2016 Warriors, the best regular-season team in NBA history, became an unrelenting meme after a historic Finals collapse. Now they're back in the Finals for the third straight season, only it's against a Cavs team that's far more talented than those plucky '88 Dodgers and '90 Reds, led by one of the best players in NBA history, LeBron James.

As one Warriors- and A's-supporting buddy explained to me: "I was at Game 3 of the '88 series, the only game the A's won. I nearly caught McGwire's game-winning homer. True story. That A's team captured northern California the way this Warriors team has. And it will kill me, and lot of other people, all over again if the same sh** happens over the next few weeks."

Both today's Warriors and the 1988-1990 A's should be acknowledged as some of the best teams to ever play in their respective sports, regardless of how these NBA Finals play out. But fairly or not, winning it all remains the standard for success. If you're a fan pulling off I-880 for tonight's Game 1, you're rooting hard for LeBron to be vanquished, and for the memory of Kirk Gibson and Kyrie Irving's Game 7 winner and Mickey Freaking Hatcher to be buried forever.