Detroit Free Press

All right, Rasheed. You want to make up for it? Have a monster game tonight. Have a game where you not only start strong, you finish strong, too. Have a game where you don't float in and out like a ghost going from room to room looking for someone to scare. Because the Pistons need you to be scary tonight. And, quite frankly, you owe them one.

SAN ANTONIO - They took every stone the devil could throw, and they caught the last one and threw it back in his face. It took history. It took belief. It took desperation in every dribble. But mostly it took hope, and with every Pistons achievement - every Rip Hamilton jumper, every Rasheed Wallace put-back, every Ben Wallace block, every Chauncey Billups three-pointer - there was hope. They were supposed to die, because that's what teams do when faced with silly odds. But here they were at the end, heading off the floor with one more game to play.Dead men walking.

You don't leave him alone. You never leave him alone. But there he was, alone, at his favorite killer spot, the three-point line, Rasheed Wallace had gotten snookered, and by the time Tayshaun Prince went charging toward the killer, like a man trying to save a dog from a speeding bus, it was too late. The killer lined it up. The killer got it in his sights. The killer fired. The killer hit.

Dad needs a song.I mean, it's Father's Day. He oughta have a sound track. Everyone else has a sound track. When Tony Soprano takes the screen, he gets "Woke Up This Morning." When the Pistons take the floor, we hear "The Final Countdown." Even the president has "Hail to the Chief."But I have spent some time looking into this and, as often happens with dads in America, they are getting gypped.Lovers? There are endless songs for lovers. Children? My goodness. They'll make you weep. And mothers? Even rap artists put down their profanity to pay homage to Mom.

Thursday was some night for Lindsey Hunter at the Palace. He was draining baskets from the corner, from the key, down the lane, off the glass. He was dishing assists and shaking defenders, stepping up past flying bodies and firing away. He had a team-high 17 points, and his younger teammates spurred him on, slapping each other the way kids do when they see their father take the joystick on a video game."Old man, you still got it," Richard Hamilton told him.

This was the moment that said it all: Tayshaun Prince, holding the ball, alone on the wing with Manu Ginobili, the early god of these NBA Finals. And Ginobili stuck a big, old Argentinean hand in front of Tayshaun's eyes. Block his vision? That schoolyard trick? Tayshaun shook his head, then shook his shoulders, then shook his torso and his feet - Elvis getting ready to rock - and then he shook off Ginobili as surely as a Labrador shakes off a bath. Whoosh. He blew right past him for a two-handed slam.

NEWS ITEM: American Airlines now will charge $15 to check your first bag. Last week other airlines announced they would do the same.My sweet, old grandfather came down from heaven recently, just in time to join me at the airport. He'd been gone for years, so a plane trip had him excited."Why aren't you wearing a suit and tie?" he asked. "This is an airplane, not a bus."Planes aren't a big deal anymore, Gramps."Pooh. You fly in the sky, it's a big deal."We pulled up to the curb."What, no one to take our luggage?"

Behind every good man, there's a woman counting his rebounds. And Chanda Wallace didn't like the numbers. She doesn't, as a rule, give a lot of basketball advice (I guess if your husband, Ben, is the NBA's defensive player of the year, how much is needed?), but she knows her man. She knows the signs. And as any wife will tell you, one of those signs "is when he doesn't get 10 rebounds. That's when I get concerned."So Chanda sat Ben down after the first game of these NBA Finals against the Spurs, in which the Pistons were beaten soundly.