Nuggets Fever - Is There A Cure?

Time. Only time will cure this fever. Yesterday was the big parade and celebration for the Denver Nuggets after they won the 2023 NBA Championship. I turned the television on to the morning news, and that was the only story being covered. They were expecting over 700,000 fans downtown for this event, and so I knew that I would never get any decent photographs of the parade. Therefore, I decided to go down later to photograph the crowd in Civic Center Park, where the event was being held. I have never seen such a huge crowd since my sister Susan and I went down to Grant Park in Chicago back in 1979 to hear Pope John Paul II speak (Susan was deep into her Catholic period at the time: "John Paul II, we love you"). Streets throughout the Loop were filled with pedestrians instead of cars, and when I passed a McDonald's and looked in the window, it appeared that it had been taken over by hundreds of nuns. But I digress. Yesterday I took the light rail downtown and headed straight to the steps of the state capitol, where I knew I could get a shot of the crowd, as seen in the above photograph. And the celebration was a great success. While 10 people were shot at 20th and Market Streets in the LoDo neighborhood during the celebration right after the Nuggets victory, only two people were shot yesterday. After all, the LoDo crowd is young and boisterous, while yesterday's crowd seemed to be a cross-section of the entire population, including lots of older people who just aren't as fast on the draw as they used to be. I would definitely call that a success.