As the culminating moment of a career begins to slowly fade into increasingly distant memory, the image that will always endure in the mind of Ish Smith is the one he captured when he looked up.
Confetti plummeted toward him until it engulfed him like a realization.
“We won it,” he recalls thinking. “We won it.”
The singular emotion from that championship celebration that will always endure for Smith is indicative of how the 35-year-old thinks, how he makes decisions and how he ended up back in Charlotte this season.
“I was just thinking about all the stories, the storylines,” Smith told The Denver Post on Monday — somewhat fittingly, hours after 2023 became a thing of the past.