This post is going to be slightly different from our norm and will have more of a personal touch to it.

Well, the Dallas Mavericks have finally done it. After over a decade of regular season excellence which all previously concluded with one underachieving and heartbreaking outcome after another, the Mavs have won the 2011 NBA Finals and are now world champions.

Pictured below is my still-intact ticket stub from Game 1 of the 2006 Finals that featured the first original matchup between the Mavs and the Miami Heat. All the way up until the end of Sunday’s Game 6, I suppose you could have called me a loser for hanging onto something so insignificant yet meaningful at the same time as it evoked memories of joy and eventual pain.

My apologies for getting sentimental here but I’ll admit for the last five years watching the Mavs bow out early in the playoffs in head-scratching fashion each time, I’d often pull this ticket stub out of the collection of other random crap I have to remind myself that these Mavs did indeed play for an NBA title before. It also made me wonder if they would ever get back there again in my lifetime.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to fly back to Dallas and try to catch a game this time around due to work and travel constraints. Otherwise, there would be a pic of a ticket stub from one of the games from this series as well.

Nobody aside from Charles Barkley thought these Mavs had a shot at going far in this year’s playoffs. The Blazers were the trendy pick to pull off a 1st round upset, the defending champion Lakers were supposed to annihilate the Mavs because they were just too soft and the Thunder were going to be too athletic and play too fast for them to keep up.

In the midst of the second round sweep of the Lakers, my buddies back home in Texas and I jokingly/hopingly said to each other that it’d be great that if the Mavs somehow make a run to the Finals; they would also get a shot at payback/redemption and face the Heat.

There’s no better definition of poetic justice than having the Mavs cap off their amazing playoff run and clinch the title on Miami’s home court the very same way they did to Dallas in 2006. Even more sweeter is that they did it against the Big 3 in Wade, Bron and Bosh. Still hard to believe the Mavs accomplished this feat that my friends and I have been waiting for since 2001 (The year the Mavs returned to the playoffs after over a decade-long postseason drought.) when we were just 12 years old at the time.

Don’t you fret AvsDynasty; Bron’s time will come sooner than you think and at some point, your Miami Heat will have won not 7, not 6, not 5, not 4, not 3, not 2 but at least 1 NBA title at the very least. As the Mavs have shown, these things don’t happen overnight.

Well, enough ranting and back to business. We’ll be getting the Mavs NBA Champs hats hopefully around Tuesday or Wednesday this week. Once we get them, they’ll be live on our site at HatClub.com along with a whole new set of New Era custom fitteds and Zephyr snapbacks that just arrived at our warehouse.

Feels good man. Feels damn good.

- Jon Nguyen