The day they took the team was the kind of June afternoon that should have been about baseball. Instead, it was about a moving van, a handshake in Oklahoma, and a phone call to a city that had spent forty-one years calling them ours. You remember where you were. Most people in this town do.

Eighteen years on, the picture has changed in ways nobody could have scripted. Climate Pledge Arena went up on the bones of the old KeyArena. The Kraken arrived and proved a Pacific Northwest hockey market was not a punchline. And quietly, through the long winter of expansion politics, a group calling itself One Roof Sports kept its head down and built the case.

This is not nostalgia. It is something stranger and more useful. Seattle is being asked to remember itself, and to decide what kind of franchise it wants when the green and gold come back.