Inside the empty Oracle Arena one recent Saturday morning, it felt like a trading floor in the off hours during a bull run. Prospective season ticket holders were there to eyeball available seats, each marked with a Warriors T-shirt draped over it. As I walked out of a tunnel into the lower level, my eyes adjusting to the darkened arena, I experienced a deep panic. The market had clearly been surging. Of the 10,000 lower-level seats, only 50 in the darkest corners still had T-shirts on them. When the sales guy showed me the price of nailing down four of those for my family, my head whirled.

Suddenly, I was pissed at Don Nelson.

When Nellie took over coaching the Warriors again, the team had been losers the previous dozen years, and it wasn’t that hard to score a decent ticket—you just didn’t usually want one. Two years later, Bay Area basketball fans have been revealed for what they are: passionate and knowledgeable, suckers for unconventionality, and adept at milking their credit lines.

Four seats, top row, section 119—those are now ours. We’ll have to sell our tickets for half of the 41 regular-season games to avoid insolvency, but at least we’re in the building, and not in nosebleed seats. The lure isn’t only Nellie’s chaotic, incautious, roller-coaster, and incredibly fun-to-watch style. It’s also that he mostly wins. If he either manages to win 53 games this season or decides to re-up for one more year, he’ll pass Lenny Wilkens as the all-time leader in coaching victories.

However long he stays, the sporting public should watch our wallets. After being a joke for 11 years, owner Chris Cohan has had the last laugh since rehiring Nellie. More than 12,000 season tickets at these prices is just astonishing—plus the team sells out most games, and the TV deals can’t be chump change. All because of one sixty-something guy who showed up, rejiggered the team’s roster, and coached the resulting toolbox of interchangeable parts into the play-offs and then to a 48–34 record.

Let’s face it: The Bay Area isn’t normally a basketball hotbed on par with Philly, New York, Houston, D.C., or Indiana, at least among the men. Barely more than a handful of current NBA players grew up here—and only one, Jason Kidd, counts. Stanford is the nation’s most boring Top 25 team (sorry, Mom), and its success is countered by the area’s barely there college programs (think USF).

But clearly, we have a latent basketball jones anyway. When I was in high school, I watched a decent Warriors team jell with shocking suddenness to win the 1975 NBA title. Going to those play-off games at the Coliseum and the Cow Palace was like plugging yourself into a sporting orgasmatron. The lack of orthodoxy was what made the team so Bay Area–appropriate. It had no real center. Rick Barry was an egotistical headcase. The second-best player (Jamaal Wilkes) was a rookie. And the team always seemed to fall a dozen or more points behind.

Then Barry would hit two or three long jump shots, the cast of nobodies would nominate the night’s hero (“Charles Johnson

with a fallaway jumper from behind the backboard!”), and they’d storm back. Those crowds were louder than war, louder than God.

But not as loud as the crowd at one of ’07’s Warriors-Jazz play-off games. My fam­ily must have paid a month’s mortgage not to miss that one. I was standing with my then 10-year-old son, Neil, and after Baron Davis threw down that legendary dunk on Andrei Kirilenko’s nose, Neil asked me to stop making that weird, ecstatic face when I screamed. It was embarrassing him.

Now I’m broke, as well as embarrassed. Nellie needs to retire fast.