The Finals are rigged.

As good Mavericks fans, Chelsea and I attended the NBA Finals game 3 watching party at American Airlines Center with about 10,000 of our closest friends. We thought we would have a great time watching the game on the jumbotron and eating junk food. (Well, I was eating junk food while Chel was sticking to the diet.)

Turns out that watching a game on a jumbotron in a half-empty arena doesn’t have quite the same energy as watching a game that’s actually happening in the same building you’re sitting in. We’re getting old, because after the first quarter we got tired of squinting at the screen to see if Dirk Nowitzki’s shots were made or missed. (I think we can safely assume that Dirk’s shots were missed.)

So we went home and watched the rest of the game on the family tube, which by an optical illusion of where we were sitting actually looked larger than the jumbotron at the arena.

These last three Mavs losses have led us to question whether these NBA Finals are pre-scripted, much like the “sport” of professional wrestling. Maybe that’s a sour grapes theory caused by our team losing, but you’ve got to wonder whether Mark Cuban and the Heat owner got together and said, hey, let’s make sure this thing goes six or seven games so we can get full arenas and all the TV revenue that goes along with it. Or maybe it’s the league and the refs making the back-room deals.

But should it matter if the whole thing is set up? Movies are scripted, but I enjoy those. (Except “The Break Up,” but that’s a different topic.) Maybe cheering for Dirk is just like rooting for Stone Cold Steve Austin or whatever that wrestler dude’s name is. And if it is set up, that would give me a certain comfort in explaining why all the big German’s shots have been off the mark.

Regardless, let’s hope there’s a Mavs win in the script for game 6.