Damian Lillard

Back in Portland

Three times we stood in the same tunnel as Damian Lillard. The third time, we met him.

He was injured that night and not in uniform, but he came through the tunnel. Christian got a high five, which at ten is not nothing. Around him, though, other Bucks were stopping. Signing. Taking their time. And the one name he had come for kept walking.

A year later we were back. He was healthy and in the lineup. This time there wasn't even a high five.

That is the part that stung, and it stung for a reason that had very little to do with us. Everything we had read said Damian Lillard was one of the kind ones — generous with his fans, unhurried, the sort who understands what a minute of his evening is worth to somebody else's. The disappointment wasn't that a player walked past a kid. That happens, and it's allowed. It was that the man we had heard about did not seem to be in the building.

We have no idea what those two nights held for him. Nobody standing in a tunnel does. You get a few seconds of a man on one evening of a long and difficult year and you come away thinking you've seen him.

Last season he was back in Portland with a ruptured Achilles, out for all of it. And he was a completely different person — which is to say, he was exactly the person everyone had always described.

He stopped. He talked to Christian. Actually talked to him, not past him. He signed his cards, and he signed them properly: paint pen, no hurry, the way a man signs when he knows the card is going to outlive the night.

Then I got my moment. I said, respectfully — I like seeing you back in Portland, sir, instead of Milwaukee.

He was already moving by then, finished, heading up the tunnel. He said it over his shoulder, without breaking stride.

"Man, me too. Me too, man."

We don't hold the first two nights against him. We only know that the third one was the real one — and that the truest thing he said, he said without stopping. If he's in the tunnel again this season, we'll be glad to see him. He walked past Christian on 11 November 2023. He stopped for him on 10 November 2025. One day short of two years.