Steph Curry Came Off the Bench for the First Time in 14 Years. He Dropped 29 in 26 Minutes. The Warriors Lost by One.

Steph Curry hadn't played a basketball game in 66 days.

Two months. Twenty-seven games missed. A knee injury that had him in street clothes while the Warriors went 10-17 without him, stumbling from fringe playoff team to a sub-.500 mess clinging to the 10th seed like it was a life raft.

And when he finally came back on April 6 against the Houston Rockets, Steve Kerr brought him off the bench.

Off. The. Bench.

The greatest shooter in the history of basketball — 4,000-plus career three-pointers, a number so absurd the second-place guy (James Harden) is nearly 1,000 behind — came into a game as a substitute for the first time since March 7, 2012. That was 14 years ago. Barack Obama was running for reelection. The Warriors hadn't won a single championship yet.

Curry played 26 minutes. He scored 29 points. He went 5-for-10 from three. He became the 26th player in NBA history with 9,000 career field goals. And then he watched Alperen Sengun score with 11.1 seconds left to put the Rockets up 117-116.

Curry got a look at a buzzer-beater from the top of the key. It was just off.

Warriors lose. 117-116. Of course.

This is where Steph Curry is now.

He's 38 years old. He's averaging 27.2 points per game in a season where he's only been available for about half the games. His team is 37-44, locked into the 10th seed, which means they need to win twice in the play-in tournament just to get into the actual playoffs. Their first game is April 15 — lose that, and the season's over. No Game 2. No second chance. Just... done.

The Warriors without Steph Curry this season went 10-20. That's a pace for roughly 27 wins over a full season. That's lottery-bound. That's rebuilding. That's what this franchise looks like without him.

With him? They played at a 46-win pace. Still not great by dynasty standards, but the gap — 19 projected wins — tells you everything you need to know about what one 38-year-old point guard means to this organization.

And I think that's the part that gets me about the Houston game.

Curry didn't come back cautious. He didn't ease in. He scored 19 of his 29 points in the second half, pulling the Warriors back into a game they had no business being in. He was shooting from 30 feet like he'd never left. Five threes in 26 minutes after not touching an NBA court since January.

Kevin Durant — who now plays for these same Rockets, because the NBA is a fever dream — scored 31 that night. The guy who left Golden State years ago, playing against the guy who stayed. Durant's team won. Steph's didn't.

That's been the story for a while now, hasn't it?

Steph stayed. He stayed through the KD departure. He stayed through the Klay departure. He stayed through the 15-50 season in 2019-20. He stayed through the lottery years and the failed experiments and the front office moves that never quite worked. He won another ring in 2022 — his crowning achievement, the one that silenced every critic — and then stayed even as the team around him slowly stopped being championship-caliber.

The Warriors are 104-177 all-time without Stephen Curry. That's a .370 winning percentage. That's historically, generationally terrible. He isn't just their best player. He's the structural foundation of this franchise's relevance.

And now he's fighting for the 10th seed.

Here's what kills me: in the 53 games Curry played this season, he averaged 27.2 points, 4.9 assists, shot 41% from three. Those are All-Star numbers. Those are All-NBA numbers. He was named to his — I've lost count — like, 10th All-Star team. He won All-Star Game MVP again. At 38.

But the knee kept betraying him. January 30, he went down against the Pistons, and that was it. Out for two months while Golden State's season circled the drain.

Now he's back, and the math is brutal. The Warriors close out the regular season Sunday, then head to the play-in needing to beat either the Clippers or Trail Blazers on Wednesday. Win that, and they get one more shot on Friday against the loser of the 7-8 game. Win that, and they're the 8th seed. Lose either, and it's golf season.

Two games. Two wins. That's the playoff bar for a man who's been to six NBA Finals.

I keep thinking about the buzzer-beater that missed.

Top of the key. Clean-ish look. The kind of shot Steph Curry has hit a thousand times — literally thousands, he has more made threes than anyone who has ever lived. And it was just a little off. Just enough. Just barely.

That's the margin he's operating on right now. Not between winning and losing a single game. Between his career having one more chapter and the final page already being written.

Steph Curry came off the bench for the first time in 14 years, dropped 29 in 26 minutes, and lost by one.

If he does this in the play-in and wins? That's an all-time moment.

If he does this and loses? That might be how it ends.

Either way, I'm watching every second of it.