I’m the only person I know who refuses the conventional wisdom about the Sonics’ possible move. I believe (1) it’s not inevitable, and (2) we can and should try to prevent it.

Part of this is I’m not a reactionary “radical.” I don’t hate sports. I don’t hate television. I don’t hate working-class people. Yes, I was belittled by the jocks in high school—but I got over it.

Pro basketball is a business. And it’s a good business for a town to have, for assorted tangible and intangible reasons.

It’s good to have affluent suburbanites coming in to patronize our bars, restaurants, and pay-parking lots 41 times a year (plus 17 times for the Storm). It’s good to have blimp shots of the city skyline viewed on ESPN HD. It’s good to have basketball players (even mediocre ones) around to open supermarkets, visit sick kids, and endorse local paint stores. It’s good to have some scrappy underdogs playing under our town’s good name, fighting the good fight against the Lucking Fakers and the other bloated-superstar outfits. It’s good to have white kids rooting for black kids, and with the Storm to have boys rooting for girls.

But the price? It doesn’t have to be bank-breaking.

As I’ve written previously, we can offer the new owners a decent, if not spectacular, arena makeover. Enough to add a food court and an amusement arcade (perhaps replacing current such facilities elsewhere on the Seattle Center grounds), and to make it more viable for hockey. Tie it in with a larger Center sprucing-up, one that would directly benefit all Center-goers and citizens. The public’s part of the arena part can be paid for by keeping the current rental-car and restaurant taxes for a few years longer.

This could have all been settled with the previous owners a year ago. We now know why it wasn’t: The previous owners were preparing to sell out and take their value-appreciation profits. Now it’s the new owners’ turn. We can make ’em a reasonable offer that, if they reject it, will make ’em look like even bigger dorks than the previous owners now look like.

But back to all the overt public cynicism: An awful lot of the folks I’ve talked to, exchanged emails with, and read online said, in varying terms, that they’d like to be rid of the Sonics as a big FU to the supposed mindset of our civic leaders, who (according to this interpretation) will normally suck up to any big, worthless corporate scheme as long as it promises to turn this into “a world class city.” The team’s loss, this line of reasoning goes, is a good-riddance event that’ll show those downtown schemers a thing or two about real priorities.

When I first started hearing this line, I initially reacted that it wasn’t “The Seattle Way” to mope around in self-defeatism. But then I remembered it is.

For every element of pioneer gumption and inventiveness we’ve got, we’ve also got a huge dose of unseemly grumpiness. We love to whine that everything in this hick town totally sucks, always has and always will. Cobain took this attitude as a personal worldview. More recently, Cobain’s former next-door neighbor Howard Schultz whined on and on that the city and us fans just didn’t understand his needs.

Now we’ve got a prospective new owner who’s talkin’ just like Ken Behring and Jeff Smulyan used to, that he really really wants to keep his new team here but we’re just being insufficiently cooperative. He’s playing his assigned role by making these cynical statements; we’re playing our assigned role by giving him cynical rejoinders in response.

But behind this scripted posturing, serious backroom dealmaking can occur, and I hope it will occur. For that is also The Seattle Way.