It is over. The floor is strewn with confetti and small children. N.B.A.-championship celebrations used to be backroom affairs; the players didn't linger to commiserate, they escaped into the champagne-drenched oasis of the locker room. That’s where Jordan clutched his trophy and cried, thinking of his dead father. This time, Cleveland’s players exit stage left. It’s an orderly procession. LeBron and the other Cavaliers are shown walking toward their locker room in a dark tunnel that seems only to be lit with a black light; parts of his sneakers glow, but everything else is in shadow. Out in the bright arena, everyone stands up and goes nowhere—except for the kids, who mobilize.

Some of them are free-range, pinballing around the crowded floor or doing a dance—like Riley Curry, age four, who at one point uses the championship trophy as a mirror in which to adjust her hat. Others are held in their fathers’ arms. To a baby, every father is a giant, but this is extreme. There is Draymond Green’s son, with a pacifier, and JaVale McGee’s daughter, wearing a gold headband over her few wisps of hair, like a flapper, as though they remade “Bugsy Malone” with infants. Ryan Curry, age one, rides in her father’s arms like his pudge-cheeked dancing partner, jerked this way and that, her face aglow with her newfound altitude and overwhelmed by the maelstrom around her.

Then the players’ parents are present. “Look at me!” Kevin Durant’s mom commands at one point, when a microphone and camera are in her son’s face, directing his attention to her eyes by grabbing his pharaonic beard in a way that suddenly makes me reconsider that signature facial hair—it had seemed such a statement of manhood and independence—as nothing more than a handle. Then the players are all brought together, shorn of parents and children. The whole team is wearing matching black championship T-shirts and gray championship caps.

Doris Burke, an elegant master of ceremonies, has the microphone. Durant, the series M.V.P., is interviewed first. Then comes Curry. TV viewers are treated to that strange reverb that occurs when a live mike is sending a signal to both the TV audience and into the arena. It’s the universal sound of ceremonial events, of retirements and graduations. The championship trophy embodies both. It is a certificate of achievement (“They can never take that away from me” has become a kind of talismanic utterance of players who win their first); it’s also a signal that school’s out for summer, that this particular group will never be together again, not like this. As Heraclitus said, sort of, you can never step into the same N.B.A. team twice.

Water has been a prevailing metaphor for this season’s Warriors, and not just because their logo includes a bridge. There is the spectacle of seeing the basketball sent on long, high arcs at a great distance from the basket and then, with the trajectory of a water cannon putting out a fire, dropping down into the bottom of the net. There is Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson’s nickname, the Splash Brothers, a term born in a tweet on December 21, 2012; its creator would later remark, about this accomplishment, “It’s something no one can take away.”

(Regarding the brotherhood of the Splash Brothers, what a spectacle it has been to have Mark Jackson as a principal television commentator on the team he helped build and coach, and which then fired him at the end of that first Splash Brothers season, after which it rose to greater heights under his successor, Steve Kerr. It’s an awkwardness that Jackson has continuously redeemed with his proclamation, made in his first year as announcer, that Curry and Thompson were the best shooting backcourt of all time. At the time it sounded far-fetched.)

There is the aquatic flow of the Warriors’ offense, in which the surface motion creates an unseen riptide that pulls defenses away from the open man. And, most of all, the feeling that the Warriors, even in their worst moments, even when their game is off and they seem vulnerable, are like a massive tonnage of water contained in a vessel—the other team’s defense—that is bound to give way. And, when it does, a torrent of scoring will follow. Even Cleveland’s commanding double-digit lead in Game 4 felt precarious until the last minute. With their victory in Game 5, the Warriors tied for the best playoff record ever, 16–1.

After Curry, Thompson is summoned. Burke calls his name. There is no response. The moment has the cadence of a teacher taking attendance. Burke, and the camera, scan the crowd during a deliciously comic pause that lasts twelve glorious seconds before she again says, “Klay Thompson!,” in a tone usually reserved for people calling into an empty room in which some little kid is hiding. Midway through this pause the camera finds him, Golden Gate’s very own Bartleby the Scrivener, who, incredibly, seems to be shaking his head, no, he would prefer not to. He is way in the back, behind Kevon Looney, who didn’t play, and JaVale McGee, who didn’t play, and David West, who did. In the foreground, a shiny phone is held up by a pair of female hands, taking a picture of someone else. Thompson stands there as though hoping the moment will pass. He finally comes forward, not so much struggling through the crowd as being pushed through it by his peers, and he takes his turn.

The previous day, Kerr had said, of Thompson’s defense, “He’s like a yellow lab who chases the ball all day.”

Now Thompson submits to Burke’s questions:

“When K.D. was added, you said there would be no adjustment,” she says.

“We went 16–1. Wasn’t much of an adjustment. Easy to adjust when you are winning.”

There is something wonderfully ridiculous about Thompson’s game that feels like the unseen core of the whole system of Warriors ball. Somewhere in the midst of the whole series, I wondered if, speaking as a Knicks fan, I would be happy with a trade of Carmelo for Klay. The answer is yes, in a heartbeat. They are both incredible shooters. And yet the ball always tends to stick to Carmelo, while Klay acts as if it were a scalding object—he has a strange quality of scoring prolifically while hardly ever actually seeming to have the ball. On any given night, he might score more points than anybody has ever scored, and defend more tenaciously than anyone has ever defended, but he does it all while hardly seeming to be present. He is in some way the soul of the Warriors team.