Daggers don’t really belong on a spectrum. They are so much more important for their results (finality, punctuation, extinguished hope) than for their means, that it is rather foolish to compare them. Still, there was something particularly vicious about the final shot Alyssa Thomas took Sunday in Game 1 of the Sun-Lynx semifinals. It was the most dagger you will ever see.

Sure, the Aces-Liberty series could offer fans more star power on the court, and even star power off the court (the first game of that series featured Spike Lee yapping on Kelsey Plum’s court). But for those who are caught up in the action and only interested in pure hooping, there’s this series. The necessary drama in Sun-Lynx takes place between the lines.

In their regular season series, The Minnesota and Connecticut styles usually produced the best fights. (The Sun won two of three close games.) Both teams play active, switch-oriented defenses. Anyone who tried to plot out the series in advance probably and rightly imagined that it would be exhausting to watch. The Lynx spent parts of the game in a rare offensive slump. Kayla McBride, the most consistent three-point shooter in the league this year, finished just 1 of 5 from outside. Call it an off night, not something the Lynx will worry too much about for the rest of the series, or give some credit to the Sun defense, which stayed disciplined enough to deny Minnesota the open looks that kept its offense has generated effortlessly throughout the season.

The combination culminated in a stomach-churning fourth quarter, with each team tepidly trading piles until the final minutes, when no one actually scored. After Bridget Carleton made a transition layup to bring Minnesota within one point of Connecticut, 69-68 with 3:50 to play, it would be three more minutes before the score changed. Thomas worked through Alanna Smith for a layup; an exceptionally pleasant Lynx ATO ended with Napheesa Collier galloping through a wide open track to make it another one-point contest. But Thomas knew that this was not intended to be a series characterized by elegance. On the next possession, with the Lynx all slumped, she did the maddening, amazing thing she can reliably do when given a little bit of space at the top of the free throw line.

It’s hard to put into words what I find so devastating about Thomas’ dagger – maybe in retrospect it’s just the obvious. When people say that a game “can only end like this,” they often do so in a figurative or poetic sense. I think the saying applies in a figurative sense, but in the case of Thomas, who (say it with me) plays with torn labrums in both shoulders, the phrase is also literal. The world’s ugliest one-handed midrange shot is actually the only kind of shot she can physically make. For all its aesthetic shortcomings, there’s no way a Sun fan will feel better come clutch time.

Her performance wasn’t as dazzling as Marina Mabrey’s 20-point night, but Thomas has always been one of those players whose brilliant box scores are only realized in retrospect. She finished the game just short of a triple-double, with 17 points, 10 rebounds and nine assists. The rumors about the end-of-season awards may wrongly indicate that the 32-year-old is coming off a disappointing season last year, when she finished second in the MVP voting. (This year, with her fellow power forwards having career seasons and a shiny new phenom in Indianapolis, she may not be eligible for some first-team All-WNBA voting.) But Alyssa Thomas’s story is changing never. She doesn’t worry about how, just how much.