As the optimism-pessimism rollercoaster continues to climb and fall only to climb and fall again, one of last week’s Debbie Downers has us all hearing the clickety-clack of the car that is approaching the top of the hill.
Mike Silver of Yahoo! Sports, in an excellent but very long column that doesn’t mesh well with adult ADD, writes in the third paragraph that the league and the players are “closer to an agreement than many people realize.” In fact, Silver says that a deal is closer “perhaps than even some of the people involved realize.”
We mention this because we’ve heard that a deal truly is close. Or at least that a deal was close after midnight in Minnesota last Thursday night/Friday morning -- and that a deal could have quickly been completed if the parties had continued to meet until a deal was done.
What we don’t know is whether Tuesday’s negotiations, which surely began after Silver’s latest item was filed, will change the complexion of the talks for the worse. And so there’s a chance that, just as the late-night session on Thursday trumped much of Silver’s excellent look at the schism between the parties, intervening events will soon have us all screaming down the next drop.