In divisive times, Heat and Panthers playoff runs remind us of unifying power of sports | Opinion

We are right in it, fully immersed, engulfed by the cheering that surrounds us as we feel our community ... lifting. This is the full, flexing power of sports. We are mired in a time of divisiveness, of not agreeing on anything — but now all of South Florida pulls in one direction for two teams, for the same thing.

It is our bond. It is healing. It feels great. And we need it. We need more of it, that feeling.

Someday we will look back and fully comprehend and appreciate what is happening, the size and weight of it. Right now we are having too much fun for the macro view.

“It’s a crazy story being written,” as the Miami Heat’s Bam Adebayo put it late Friday night inside the team’s downtown bayside arena.

“Nobody in the world thought we’d be doing this,” the Florida Panthers’ Matthew Tkachuk was saying about the same time, about 1,500 miles miles straight north in Toronto.

The Heat and Panthers have done what was unheard of.

They are the first No. 8 seeds from the same market to simultaneously win the first two rounds of the playoffs and reach their Eastern Conference finals. Either doing it would be remarkable. Both doing it is historic.

Heat coach Erik Spoelstra was informed in his postgame news conference after ousting the New York Knicks on Friday night that the Panthers also had won to reach the East finals.

“I wish I could actually go to some of those events,” he said.

Tough to go to somebody else’s event when yours is an event itself happening at the same time.

Tough enough just for fans of both teams to toggle back and forth on TV or their smartphones as the Heat was beating the Knicks 96-92 to win that series 4 games to 2 and the Panthers were winning 3-2 up north on Nick Cousins’ overtime goal to take their series 4-1 over the Maple Leafs.

Cousins has an 11-month-old daughter.

“It’s something I get to tell her when she grows up,” he said.

Next, the Heat will face the winner of Sunday’s Philadelphia at Boston game in a best-of-7 series to reach the NBA Finals. Game 1 will be Wednesday night, with Miami on the road again as the lower seed, as usual.

The Panthers will face the Carolina Hurricanes in the hockey East finals for the right to reach the Stanley Cup Final. The NHL’s next-round schedule has not yet been set, with the Cats opening on the road (again) the one certainty.

Take the short break to appreciate what South Florida’s two teams have just done.

The Heat are only the second No. 8 seed in NBA history to reach a conference finals. The other was the 1999 Knicks, who ousted No. 1 Miami in the first round. (So call Friday night a much-delayed payback?)

The Panthers have a chance to join the 2012 Los Angeles Kings as the only No. 8 seed to win the Stanley Cup, or at least be the first team since Edmonton in 2006 to reach the Final.

We are accustomed to one of these franchises winning.

Miami advances to its 10th Eastern Conference finals and third in the past four seasons. The club has reached six NBA Finals and won three, with championship parades in 2006, 2012 and 2013.

The Panthers are in the NHL’s East finals for only the second time and first in 27 years, since 1996. They got swept that year in the Stanley Cup Final by Colorado. A second shot at a first franchise championship is now four wins away.

Neither team enjoying this historic postseason run is a classic, lowly No. 8 seed. The Heat reached the East finals just last year. The Panthers won the Presidents’ Trophy for the best regular-season record last year and advanced in the playoffs for the first time since ‘96. Both were limited by injuries this season before finding their form late.

Florida has a Hart Memorial Trophy finalist for league MVP in Tkachuk.

Miami has an all-NBA second team star in Jimmy Butler and an all-NBA second team defender in Adebayo.

Yet each team does have an underdog quality to it befitting an eight seed.

Each rallied late in the season to barely make the playoffs.

The Heat lost a play-in game before qualifying and then upsetting No. 1 Milwaukee and then the Knicks. The rotation is full of undrafted scrappers such as Max Strus, Gabe Vincent and Duncan Robinson. Theirs is a blue-collar team that leads all playoff teams in charges taken and loose balls recovered, a team built on deflections and steals.

“An absolute grind,” Spoelstra called the Knicks series. “It is really frickin’ hard to get to the Eastern Conference finals. We’ve had to fight and claw to earn everything we’ve gotten. We have a spirit you always hope to cultivate in your team. It doesn’t always happen.”

Adebayo spent so much of himself Friday night he needed IV fluids after the game.

“You’ll do anything,” he said. “You’ll put your body through a lot to get to four [series] wins. The ups and downs of this season. Everybody counting us out ...”

Said Butler: “One step closer to our ultimate goal. Eight more [wins] to get.”

The Panthers? They made the playoffs by a scant one point and trailed No. 1 Boston 3-1 before winning three elimination games in a row and then handling Toronto.

Because goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky was called upon to save the day, the postseason. And he has.

He has carried the weight of having disappointed and not lived up to his big contract.

He has carried the weight of being Russian and the controversy that entails with the war on Ukraine.

Now he is King Bob ... carrying his team.

“I don’t think of those things right now, the sadness and toughness,” he says. “You don’t think big right now. You think in the under-moment. I stay with the moment and enjoy the moment.”

One year ago to the day Paul Maurice, the Panthers coach, was fishing on a lake in Ontario, out of work. Florida called. He is now eight more wins from his long-elusive first Stanley Cup in a long, hockey-lifer career.

“We are real comfortable in a hard fight,” he says of his team. “We’re pretty good at getting up off the mat. I say we. I wear a suit on the bench!”

The Florida Panthers and Miami Heat, No. 8 seeds both, each fit the description.

Fighters who you thought would be knocked out by now, but fighters who keep getting up off the mat, and keep landing punches.