It has been a surreal sporting parade of the fallen, shaken and perturbed here in Seattle this week, what with the Mariners finally canning their atrocious GM and the news today that manager John McLaren is gone, too. The Mariners have pulled the plug on the 2008 season and finally admitted that it is time to rebuild. This will be, at least, a five-year process, but in a weird way, fans can accept that, since The Truth about a sports team is impossible to deny. The Mariners' brass failed to recognize that they could not fool anyone into thinking they could, year after year, remain competitive without ever doing the tough work of rebuilding. So now we have The Truth. We can deal, even if the Mariners' bottom line will suffer. What goes around comes around.

On the other side of town, The Truth about Seattle's oldest sports franchise is being debated -- in a courtroom. We all know the Sonics are going to Oklahoma City, but that has not stopped Xavier McDaniel and Gary Payton from whipping up a "crowd" of 300 Save Our Sonics fans in sadly small rallies. Clay Bennett bought this team from Howard Schultz with the intent of moving the franchise out of Seattle.

Still, today we will have the unique pleasure of one of America's great writers -- and steadfast basketball fans -- testifying about why the loss of the Sonics is the loss of a cultural asset which the citizens of Seattle and Washington state will not be able to tolerate. For this bit of dramatic reading, we had Alexie.

Between Alexie's testimony and another Mariners press conference, this one to talk about the firing of McLaren, our ears are ringing today with the sound of sporting lament the likes of which Seattle has never before heard.

Here is one of Alexie's passages from The Stranger, where he wrote in his customarily succinct but dramatic fashion, a Sonics Death Watch blog:

"I want to break into REI and tear down the climbing wall. Or dig deep ditches every 10 feet along the Burke-Gilman Trail. Or fill all the golf holes with cement. Or pretend I have biblical powers and fill Safeco Field and Qwest Field with poisonous frogs and carnivorous locusts.

I want to take away their sports because mine is being taken from me.

I want to kidnap a basketball hater. I want to drive him to a high-school gym in Reardan or Wellpinit, my hometowns. I want to sit my hostage in the bleachers and point out the grandparents, parents, siblings, cousins, and townspeople who have gathered to cheer for their team, for their families.

This is a love story, damn it.

Once, in KeyArena, after a big Sonics win, I hugged a stranger and he hugged me back. We were men crying in each other's arms.

Can't you see the beauty in that? "