They stand for the prayer that occurs roughly seven minutes before tipoff, stand for national anthem and stay on their feet until their beloved basketball team makes its first basket.
The noise rises and falls and rises again but never completely stops.
The game experience in Oklahoma City is unusual, and the 18,203 folks sure to cram into Chesapeake Energy Arena on Saturday for Game 6 of the Western Conference Finals would like to keep it that way.
The Warriors want to change the temperature in the room from hot and loud to cool and quiet. They have to change that and more to have any chance at all of stunning the Oklahoma City Thunder, who are showing signs of a long-delayed maturity.
Game 6, after all, will reveal as much about whether the Thunder is ready as it will about whether the defending NBA champion Warriors are capable of a stirring comeback.
“It will take all of our IQ, all of our gamesmanship and just 48 great minutes to get a win down there, considering how the last two games have gone,” Stephen Curry conceded in the dim glow of a Game 5 victory at Oracle Arena on Thursday.
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Curry added in the wake of that home win that the Warriors “have to take that game and travel for Game 6” to have a chance to succeed on the road.
The concern, however, isn’t that the Warriors might not have enough. It’s that the Thunder might have too much size and length and athleticism and fury –- and maybe, finally, enough heat-of-the-moment intelligence.
When OKC won Game 3 by 28, the Warriors chastised themselves for their various failings, vowing improvement while quietly hoping forward Draymond Green would not be suspended for Game 4.
He wasn’t. Yet nearly all of those failings resurfaced and the Warriors were run out of the building, losing by 24.
And now they’re back to wondering if they can find the formula that eluded them on their last visit to OKC, where they were undone by the Thunder, the crowd and themselves. Maybe even the damp, heavy late-May air.
“We play better when we’re having fun and enjoying the moment,” Curry said. “We played like we were really stressed in OKC, and it showed.
“We need to kind of let loose, be ourselves, have fun and enjoy what we’re doing.”
There were glimpses of that in Game 5. Green was his firebrand self, productive and energizing. Curry finished off the victory and shouted to the enthused crowd that “we ain’t going home,” a show of plucky defiance that suits the unimposing MVP.
Center Andrew Bogut, playing on the edge of rage, was effective. Klay Thompson did good work and played with a concentrated force not always evident.
“We all know we’re not ready to be done, “ Thompson said, “And we can do it, just one game at a time.”
The next “one game” comes Saturday and the fans of Loud City, emboldened by their effect on the Warriors in Games 3 and 4, will go after the Warriors without remorse.
They may remain standing long past the invocation and the national anthem and first OKC bucket.
It felt as if the Warriors were playing 5-on-6 in Games 3 and 4. That can’t be expected to change.
“That’s a tough, tough building to play in,” Green said. “They feed off that crowd. They’re always in attack mode there, so we’ve got to make sure that we go in there and exceed their intensity level and try to take the crowd out of the game.”
That’s quite the goal. And only the beginning of what it’s going to take to bring this series back to Oakland.
