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Our love for our teams created a shorthand between strangers \u2014 an easy, unspoken way to connect in a city where people often lived very different lives. On a BART platform, in a Kaiser waiting room or standing in line at the Safeway on Fruitvale, you could always start a conversation with: \u201cDid you see that game?\u201d<\/p>\n
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And just like that, barriers dropped.<\/p>\n
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Thaddeus Gil and his wife, Angie, pose for a portrait before Game 2 of the Western Conference playoffs between the Golden State Warriors and the Los Angeles Clippers in Oakland\u2019s Oracle Arena on April 15, 2019.<\/p>\n
Gabrielle Lurie\/The Chronicle<\/p>\n
As a former Alameda County public defender, I witnessed the bond of being an Oakland sports fan on display in the courtroom. Judges, prosecutors, public defenders \u2014 we often stood on opposite sides of deep and consequential disagreements. But mention the A\u2019s, the Raiders or the Warriors, and suddenly there was common ground. A conversation would start and shared recognition would emerge. And for a fleeting moment, the distance between courtroom combatants narrowed. That connection mattered.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In a city as diverse as Oakland, this shared language was priceless. And now it\u2019s gone. The Raiders left. The Warriors crossed the bridge. And the A\u2019s \u2014 the last thread holding it together \u2014 are gone, too. Maybe the hardest part is that we didn\u2019t fully understand what we had until it was gone. We didn\u2019t just lose teams. We lost a way of talking to each other.<\/p>\n
These weren\u2019t just teams. They were part of the connective tissue of Oakland \u2014 something that gave people a shared point of reference in a place defined by its differences. Oakland still has pride. It still has community. But the kind of common language our teams created is not easily replaced. Recreating that kind of unifying experience is difficult, and far more necessary than we understood.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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I don\u2019t know exactly what Oakland should do next, but I do know this: Having a presence in the national sports spotlight did more than draw attention; it created a shared experience and a shared language in Oakland. Without that, it\u2019s hard to imagine being able to rebuild anything that comes close to what was lost.<\/p>\n
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Slugger Reggie Jackson of the Oakland Athletics mingles with fans in front of the A\u2019s dugout in September 1969.\u00a0<\/p>\n
AP<\/p>\n
For a long time, we had something rare in Oakland, and in its absence, we see just how special it was. I think about the decades of A\u2019s games I attended, first as a kid and later with my son. I can still hear \u201cLet\u2019s go, Oakland!\u201d echo through the Coliseum, and I can see the Oakland hills and Leona Quarry rising beyond the field.<\/p>\n
Guest opinions in Open Forum and Insight are produced by writers with expertise, personal experience or original insights on a subject of interest to our readers. Their views do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Chronicle editorial board, which is committed to providing a diversity of ideas to our readership.<\/p>\n
Read more about our transparency and ethics policies<\/a><\/p>\nMy hope for Oakland is to once again have a team on the national stage that brings the city together in a single proud chant of \u201cLet\u2019s go, Oakland.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Adrienne Elenteny is a retired Alameda County public defender who grew up in Oakland. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Oakland Athletics fans April Kenton of Tracy, center. and Sara\u00a0Dunaway of San Leandro get emotional as a tribute…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":296483,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[30942,332,143,145,144,4597,975,127,13340],"class_list":["post-296482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-athletics","tag-east-bay","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news","tag-open-forum","tag-opinion","tag-sports","tag-warriors"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296482"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296482\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/296483"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}