It is time to stop talking about measuring-stick opponents for these 76ers and just enjoy them for what they are: a very good young team with a great coach and a bright future.
Are they threats to win the NBA title this year? Probably not, but neither are 80 percent of the teams in the league.
Have they earned the right not to have every win graded on a curve determined by subtracting the quality of the opponent and dividing by the impact of the compressed schedule?
Yes, and hell yes.
It should be enough, on a February Monday, to find the Wells Fargo Center packed with fans, many clad in Lakers gear and many more bellowing "Beat L.A., beat L.A." as if Iverson or Erving were in the Sixers huddle. It should be enough that they did just that.
"That was an amazing win for us," Doug Collins, the aforementioned great coach, said after his team stunned the Lakers with a late rally and a 95-90 win. "To hear the fans out there chanting, 'Beat L.A.,' took me back to 1980, when I was here as a player. That was pretty nice to hear."
What was also pretty nice, for the Sixers and their newly reenergized fans, was that this win came very much at the expense of Kobe Bryant.
On the very night he passed old teammate and nemesis Shaquille O'Neal for fifth place all-time among NBA scorers, Bryant almost single-handedly blew the Lakers' fourth-quarter lead.
He did it with desperate, off-balance, ill-advised shots. You know, the kind he normally makes at clutch time. The kind he was making in a 24-point first half that had the Lakers fans in the Center on their feet.
Now this may have just been a single off-night in a long season, or it may have been something a bit more significant. Listen to Andre Iguodala, who annoyed and frustrated Bryant defensively throughout the second half.
"He exerts a lot of energy," Iguodala said of Bryant. "He's aging a little bit. Something told me it would be hard for him to keep the pace."
No one has a better feel for the bull than the matador, and Iguodala had just spent a lot of up-close time with Bryant. So if the man with five championship rings is, at 33, starting to fade, that would be awfully significant. It is more likely, though, that he simply delivered an ordinary performance on what was, for him, just an ordinary night.
And that brings us back to these Sixers and where they stand on the long journey from the middle of the pack to the front.
