Tyrese Haliburton and the Indiana Pacers Revenge Tour got off on the right foot. It stumbled, serving as a discouraging reminder that nothing is given, no matter what pain and suffering came before it.

This was supposed to be a new chapter for Tyrese Haliburton and the Indiana Pacers. They deserved it after his injury and the Lost Season. Pacers fans deserved something good after each decade since 2000 has had franchise-altering moments that never seemed to be the positive kind.

But that’s not how life works and certainly not how sports work. They aren’t fair, and often, whether you wish to personify fate or not, circumstances are often difficult roadblocks in a pursuit of greatness. If it came easy, it would mean nothing.

Friday night’s blowout loss to the possibly actually bad Miami Heat was another reminder that despite what’s happened to the Pacers, nothing good is promised.

The opening night win made it feel like maybe Indiana wasn’t going to face more reminders of their beleaguered status as NBA bridesmaids. Since then, the injury report has grown, and fans are becoming Doubting Thomases as losses accumulate.

Haliburton deserves another shot at playing for a championship, but that will not be given to him. He doesn’t deserve recurring injuries that could be attributed to his body’s recalibration post-Achilles tear.

But that’s not what that son of bitch, or bitch herself, known as fate had decided. Maybe fate’s pronouns are they, which nonetheless would not free it from either insult. That’s if you feel fate or luck even exists at all.

The story of the current century of Indiana basketball does feel like a basketball equivalent of the story of Job. Pacers fans might ask why they face such despair despite their devout faith in the team. Job was eventually blessed in abundance. Indiana fans just want one title.

For all that has happened, and is happening in the current season, it is hard not to ascribe it to some cosmic power and not just a series of unfortunate events.

We often jokingly refer to fate in the NBA as basketball gods. Some all-seeing presence that will hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth of a fanbase and will choose benevolence if the players’ sacrifices prove worthy.

But I’m a basketball god atheist. There are no basketball gods. If you’re still calling on them, you can expect a dead line. No, there isn’t always a reason for the pain.

Yet we’d still end up in the land of the basketball supernatural if we called the franchise cursed. Who would be enforcing that curse?

Does the malevolent creature that guided a beer toward Ron Artest and ended the Reggie Miller era in disgrace have a name?

What basketball demon or devil would be in charge of the placement of basketball stanchions? What foul being ripped to shreds the limbs of Haliburton, Victor Oladipo, and Paul George? What incorporeal spirit altered the lottery so the Pacers couldn’t even get a ‘deserved’ top four pick? Does the malevolent creature that guided a beer toward Ron Artest and ended the Reggie Miller era in disgrace have a name? What infernal monster decided to put the evil known as the New York Knicks in basketball’s promised land as some sort of blasphemy?

No, they don’t exist, even if it feels illogical to describe everything that’s happened to the Pacers over the last quarter century as not the work of a group of uncaring basketball deities, but merely an unrelated series of events. It’s almost crueler when it’s random chance, not even fate casting its gaze on Indiana and sneering. Hope can destroy a man’s soul when its very existence means heartbreak after heartbreak.

But maybe, one day, it will all be worth it.

It’s nearly impossible to end up in some area of keeping the faith or otherwise the promise of heavenly rewards when talking sports. Even those with their souls given over in the math of analytics fall into a similar trap. Arthur C. Clarke once said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Though perhaps in some cases, be it the Boston Celtics’ dogged reliance on three-pointers or Kenny Atkinson’s winning-on-paper quote, that blind faith in the numbers can be indistinguishable from that of sport’s most unquestioning saints? Is not “Trust the Process” an article of faith?

But I’m telling you, whether your heart still prays to the basketball gods or you have a doggish devotion to analytics, or somewhere in between, that one day, your belief in the Pacers will be rewarded.

When — and hopefully, if anyone serves it, it is Haliburton — the Pacers finally do the damn thing, it will be with the knowledge it was earned. It was not given. It will not be bestowed upon Indiana because of its suffering. It will come on the sacrifices of those on the court and, to a much lesser extent, the cheering of the faithful surrounding them.

And that will make it mean much more than if some feckless basketball gods play a role.

And if they do exist, then damn them. Damn them straight to the same hell they’ve placed the Pacers in.

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