Sweet home, Sonics

Amid the courtroom theatrics of embarrassing e-mails and unsportsmanlike blustering, the truth came calling in the case of Seattle vs. The-Man-Possessed.

Author Sherman Alexie, a Sonics season ticket-holder, was called to testify in City of Seattle v. Professional Basketball Club LLC on the importance of the Sonics to Seattle.

Fourteen years of rarely missing a game have given Alexie a clear and deep view of the Sonics as a team that helped foster Seattle's civic identity and pride. Bore through the fine print of contract law, honest and dishonest intentions, Alexie's testimony asks us, and remember that the essence of this case is how much we are a community in love with sports and much improved by having the Sonics.

The National Book Award winner summoned the stuff of poetry, comparing players to Greek gods and the absence of the team to literature without Shakespeare. He invoked his childhood on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Stevens County, inheriting a love of basketball through hoop games with his father, using a Folger's coffee can nailed to a tree as a basket. A roll of duct tape was the ball.

The Sonics helped build the bonds across racial, gender and economic lines that we enjoy in Seattle. It is the nature of the National Basketball Association, where players hail from 31 countries.

Alexie recounts bonding moments inspired by ethnic pride, such as when the player Pau Gasol, who hails from Spain, comes out and Spanish songs break out in the stands.

Amid the litigation, Alexie's words are the ones to hold onto. The case before U.S. District Judge Marsha Peckman is as poignant as contract law will ever get.

At the end, Sonics owner Clay Bennett should be made to honor the lease he signed until its expiration in 2010. All home games ought to be played at KeyArena.

A city benefits from having a sports team. Some of these benefits are tangible, such as tax revenue and jobs. Others are no less important for being felt more than seen. Alexie captured this best in his testimony.

"When I moved to Seattle, I was terrified," he said. "Big city for me, huge city. I mean I went to high school with 50 kids. So one of the ways I made it small and intimate and like home was through the Sonics."

Seattle plus Sonics equals home.