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Markelle Fultz is about to get his party invite | David Murphy

A city known for being over-the-top is poised to explode when the Sixers become winners

THE THOUGHT crossed my mind sometime between the wedding proposal and the raising of the banner featuring the former general manager's face. This was a little over a month ago, on a beautiful spring day that thousands of area residents had decided to spend in a dimly lit sports bar standing shoulder to shoulder with their hands wrapped around aluminum bottles of light beer. As the banner climbed to the ceiling and their voices echoed off the walls in a unison that sounded eerily religious, I wondered about the 19-year-old basketball player whose fate was about to be decided by the revelation of the Sixers' draft position.

Does he have any idea what he is getting himself into?

You didn't need to be at Xfinity Live! on May 16 to know that these are special times in our fair city. At the same time, if you'd simply wandered in off the street from some place like Phoenix or Maryland, you would have been forgiven for feeling overwhelmed.

Philadelphia is a strange place. It's a beautiful kind of strange, no doubt. But strange is strange. To someone who has never before experienced a full immersion, it can be a shock to the senses. It's just a bit . . .

Much. That's the word for it. Much. A good much, but, again . . . much.

This is something I realized nine years ago while covering the Phillies' improbable run to the city's first major sports championship in nearly three decades. There might be better places for a professional athlete to play, be it New York or Los Angeles or anywhere where you don't have to live through four months of bleak, gray, drizzly winter. But as somebody who has spent considerable time in every major professional sports market and lived for four years in SEC football country, I can tell you that there is no better place to win than Philadelphia.

The Sixers are still a long way from winning. The unknowns still outnumber the knowns. We need to see Joel Embiid make it a calendar year without undergoing surgery. We need to see Ben Simmons play full-contact basketball on his surgically repaired foot. We need to see what these two freakishly proportioned athletes and their wildly unique skill sets look like operating in the same halfcourt.

But whenever the Sixers do start winning, they are poised to unleash a storm more perfect than this city has ever scene. The Phillies got a taste of it during their three-year run of dominance that followed that 2008 World Series title, selling out 257 consecutive games and shifting the market's power center across Pattison Avenue. Those were fun times, a four- or five-year dream sequence. With any luck, we'll get to experience another summer like those ones before our time on Earth is through.

Those were simpler times, though.

Part of it was the nature of the sport itself. Baseball is consumed within the fabric of the summer, interspersed with family vacations and sleep-away camps and weekends down the shore. The season unfolds like a critically acclaimed movie, full of subtle subplots and nuanced character development, an experience more than a spectacle. Much of the drama occurs outside the field of play, the intrigue centered on things like lineup construction and bullpen usage and the next big thing down on the farm.

Football, meanwhile, happens 16 times a year, with another few weeks' worth of playoffs. The Eagles are an event, like a holiday, or a family reunion. There's nothing like football season, either. But it is its own kind of thing.

I imagine that following a 50-win basketball team in today's NBA feels a lot more like a party, a crisp couple of hours of pure athleticism and physical dominance. There's a reason why the television ratings of this year's finals were the highest since the days of Michael Jordan. No sport is easier to watch than basketball played at its highest level. There's a hypnotizing rhythm to it, the ball movement, the help defense, the knock-down three.

And that's before you even take into consideration the four-year buildup to what we could be about to witness. Talk to anybody who has covered sports in this town since the dawn of the WIP era and they'll tell you that they've never seen anything like the spectacle the Sixers have become. In hindsight, Sam Hinkie's Process wasn't just a polarizing revolution in roster building, but one of the most effective viral marketing campaigns in the history of professional sports. There's more than a little irony in the fact that Joel Embiid, whose selection and subsequent injuries were once held up as an example of the error of Hinkie's ways, has appointed himself as the man to carry his ex-boss' flame.

I thought about all of this as I walked through Xfinity Live! that day in May.

It was over the top. It was absurd. And it was a lot of fun.

On Thursday night, barring yet another wrinkle, Markelle Fultz joins the party.

dmurphy@phillynews.com

@ByDavidMurphy