There were 283 previous instances before Saturday night of an NBA team playing seven consecutive away games in a season. No team had ever won all seven.
The Golden State Warriors, at 24-0, were seeking win No 25 at the Milwaukee Bucks in their seventh consecutive away game. Try No 284.
ESPN personality John Buccigross forebodingly tweeted that rather obscure factoid out on Friday night. Surely, if this weirdly particular barrier were ever to be broken, the history-making Warriors – the perfect Warriors – would do it, right?
Well, not quite. The perfect Warriors are no more, beaten 108-93 by the Bucks. Long live the reign of seven-game road trips.
It would be silly, after all the Warriors have done and given that it is still remarkably early in the season, to try to draw too much insight from this game. They played a double-overtime game the night before, against a tough Boston Celtics team, in what proved to be the last gasp of this particular win streak.
"I told the guys post-game, now we can have a regular season," Draymond Green said to ESPN afterward. "It's been kind of a playoff feel to this, just with the streak and all the media around, all the attention around."
The Warriors did finally seem weighed down a bit by all that in the end. The magnitude of how-long-will-this-go and records being set and sought.
Green added: “I think probably the last seven or eight games, I think we’ve stopped getting better.”
Now Golden State can get back to getting better. Play a regular season, like a regular team – instead of one implausibly keeping up the pretense that 82-0 might be possible.
They can relax for a few months, at least until they either lose for an 11th time and dismiss the idea they might catch the 95/96 Chicago Bulls win record, or approach actually breaking it.
But for now the Warriors have earned a moment to exhale. Before, as Stephen Curry said, they “get back to playing our best basketball”.
Perhaps promisingly, another obscure fact that started at Reddit began making the rounds after the Warriors lost. In five previous seasons the Bucks have ended a 12-plus game winning streak.
All five of those previous teams – the 71/72 LA Lakers, 73/74 Celtics, 82/83 Philadelphia 76ers, 06/07 San Antonio Spurs and 10/11 Dallas Mavericks – won the NBA title.
If the Warriors continue this form – 24-1 form – the reign of teams-with-12-game-winning-streaks-ended-by-the-Bucks will probably continue, too.
Follow us on Twitter @NatSportUAE
Like us on Facebook at facebook.com/TheNationalSport