Will we miss the NBA? YEA

C’mon, NBA owners. Pay your players so we can have a season.Basketball and winter go together. To borrow from Frank Sinatra, you can’t have one without the other. When the snowflakes start falling outside, we expect to see the jump shots start falling inside.Pro basketball is excitement, energy, the squeak of sneakers on the Garden parquet. It keeps us awake like a shot of Dunk’s when nighttime visits by 5 p.m. ? just like founder Dr. James Naismith intended when he created “basket ball” in the winter of 1891, 120 years ago.If you’re from Massachusetts, you should particularly care to see pro basketball prevail this winter. For the first “basket ball” game was played in none other than the Springfield YMCA ? at the future site of Springfield College. Today, that city has continued its ties to the NBA as the host of the Pro Basketball Hall of Fame.And let’s face it, the local team isn’t getting any younger. If David Stern and Billy Hunter postpone this season, by the time the Big Three come back to play at TD Garden, they’ll be old enough to qualify for the senior discount at Applebee’s. Worse yet, their window for banner No. 18 would be all but shut.Celtics aside, this NBA season would still have its share of subplots. Could LeBron James and the Miami Heat get their act together in Year Two of the “super team,” for instance ? could Derrick Rose restore the Chicago Bulls to a level of success they haven’t seen since the Michael Jordan days ? and could Kevin Durant and the Oklahoma City Thunder figure out a way to be the biggest thing in their state since Rodgers & Hammerstein?It’s just not the same watching college basketball. There seems to be less continuity there than the NBA because everyone’s leaving school early to join the pros. And there’s little local interest. Yes, BC-UNH was an exciting game, but our state isn’t Kansas ? or North Carolina ? or even California, and maybe in some aspects that’s a good thing, but not in the NCAA.Football comes once every week and with all the “replays” and “coaches’ challenges,” the games are starting to feel like they last a week. And hockey? Well, the last NHL team to repeat as champion was the 1997-98 Detroit Red Wings. And I’ve got news for everyone on the Bruins Bandwagon. Your team is not the Detroit Red Wings.So let us hope NBA owners and players come up with a compromise to save Dr. Naismith’s game. It is, after all, just what the doctor ordered to cure the winter blahs.Rich Tenorio can be reached at [email protected].